International cooperation and its role in ensuring everyone’s right to health care and medical assistance

Abstract

The article states that the right to health care and medical care is a guarantee of the right to life. To the state in accordance with Part 2 of Art. 3 of the Constitution of Ukraine is entrusted with the duty to affirm and ensure human rights and freedoms, including the right of everyone to health care and medical assistance. Such a duty of the state is defined as the main one among its other duties. For its implementation, Ukraine must create an effective mechanism for ensuring the above-mentioned right. The Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and, as a result, Russia’s temporary occupation of part of the territory of Ukraine, the commission of crimes in such territories that fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and testify to violations of human rights in the field of health care, have actualized the issue of the specifics of international cooperation of states in the field of health care under conditions of military occupation, pandemics, etc. and its role in ensuring the above-mentioned right of every person. The doctrinal approaches to defining the concepts of «cooperation», «international cooperation», and international treaties on human rights are analyzed. It has been established that diametrically opposite points of view are expressed in the scientific literature: from the declaration of cooperation as a duty of states to the complete denial of the legal force of this principle. The author’s definition of the concept of international cooperation in the field of health care is formulated - it is a complex of legal means, methods and institutions that are the result of joint multilateral or bilateral activities of states and which they use to achieve common goals of sustainable development in the field of health care in accordance with generally recognized principles and norms of international law. Attention is focused on the fact that the result of international cooperation are international standards of human rights in the field of health care, which are adopted by international organizations of a universal and regional nature, and which are implemented in national legislation, but such standards are the result of the cooperation of states, albeit within the framework international intergovernmental organizations, since these organizations are not endowed with special competence by nature, but are endowed by states by defining it in the charter of such organizations.