Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World by Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World by Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin Matheus de Carvalho Hernandez (bio) and Inga T. Winkler (bio) Benjamin Mason Meier & Lawrence O. Gostin, Human Rights in Global Health: Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World (Oxford University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780190672676, 614 Pages. Institutions matter. This is the key message of the volume on Human Rights in Global Health edited by Benjamin Meier and Lawrence Gostin. With a renewed and comprehensive vision of human rights after the end of the Cold War and wide-ranging calls for entering the era of implementation of human rights,1 the inextricable link between human rights and global health has become generally accepted. Global health issues demand complex solutions, solutions that depend on a range of actors. They depend on global health governance. The encounter between these two realms—human rights and global health—places international institutions in the center of dynamics, demonstrating their strategic role for the realization of the right to health. The volume's main goal is to evaluate the connections between public health, global governance, and human rights. It presents a vast array of international organizations based on a broad understanding of global health, ranging from the WHO, to organizations in the UN system, to organizations focused on economic governance, to the UN human rights system. While States remain the primary duty-bearers for the realization of human rights, international organizations have a significant influence and such a wide definition of global health governance is appropriate for the multilevel and multi-stakeholder nature of the issue. It acknowledges that a broad range of organizations (including those whose mandate is not originally linked to global health) indeed have an impact on global health.2 The result of this immense analytical effort is a volume with over 600 pages, five sections, and twenty-four chapters that bring together forty-six authors, including many key experts in the health and human rights field. The first section provides the theoretical, historical, and conceptual basis regarding the relevance of human rights for global health, especially the rights-based approach to health. Chapter Three defines global governance for health as "the structures and methods of governing public health through multi-level and multisectoral institutions, including the actors and norms that define global health in an increasingly globalized [End Page 1045] world,"3 and discusses the role of human rights in influencing these governance processes. The section concludes with a forward-looking chapter on the need to reform global health governance in order to realize human rights in the sustainable development era (and the SDGs also feature prominently in other chapters). The second section is devoted to the World Health Organization (WHO) as the main specialized agency for global health. The authors explore the political and internal constraints and resistance to rights-based approaches inside the WHO. The section also assesses the current Gender, Equity, and Human Rights mainstreaming processes and analyzes the strategic position of the WHO in the future of global health governance. The third section discusses the different approaches of the UN agencies, funds, and programs to mainstreaming human rights into global health. The chapters are dedicated to analyzing each organization (UNICEF, ILO, UNESCO, UNFPA, FAO, and UNAIDS) within their respective mandates and their efforts to promote a human rights-based approach to global health. The section demonstrates how these UN entities have been seeking (with different levels of success) to implement Kofi Annan's appeal to mainstream human rights in all their practices. The final forward-looking chapter of the section (Chapter Fourteen focuses on the role of organizational partnerships for health and human rights. As it is impossible to delink human rights mainstreaming from development cooperation, the welcome fourth section goes beyond institutions that consider global health as the core of their mandate and approaches global economic governance institutions and funding agencies. The chapters critically discuss the role of these institutions in integrating human rights into their recommendations on economic reform and poverty reduction. Following an introductory chapter on the integration of the human rights-based approach and the right to development into global governance to health, the...