Hardwired human rights: a health and human rights perspective on global health law

Abstract

The core message of this chapter is as follows: we need to take Larry Gostin’s Global Health Law seriously. We need to do so in part because the book has heroic appeal, and in part too because it makes many legitimate criticisms of law and international human rights law in particular. In larger part Global Health Law needs to be taken seriously because it will have effects. My chapter emphasizes how it will cause different dimensions of human rights and law to emerge and to disappear, and how this in turn will influence not just the choices we can make but the questions that are asked. To support these claims, I explore how Gostin’s views might affect economic and social rights and international human rights law more generally. I conclude that Global Health Law ought to be seen as a mischief-maker, both because it promotes a dated and damaging picture of economic and social rights, and because it has too narrow a sense of law and too much faith in governance as an essential supplement. Responding to this, I call for a different state of mind—a state of mind that will enable intelligent critique, the aim of which is to hardwire human rights and, more particularly, human rights law. And to be clear, to hardwire human rights and human rights law is not to crown them as the ultimate tool or guide. Nor do I suggest that my own field, health and human rights, has—or ever could have—all the answers. I am simply committing all of us, whether our field is global health law, health and human rights, or something similar, to the exciting but genuinely challenging work of understanding how rights work in practice across both law and non-law settings.