The Universal Human Right to Access to Effective Health Care: A Catholic Christian Response to Aasim Padela

Abstract

In Western, democratic societies, law and faith are usually kept distinct. Nevertheless did religious ideas also have a significant impact on the development of legal ideas in the Western world. This has been most notable in the development of human rights law based on Natural Law thought. Yet, human rights are universal and not dependent on specific cultural ideas, which is also the idea behind the universal accessibility of Natural Law. Today, human rights are defined in international documents, both binding treaties and non-binding but nevertheless notable, soft law documents. The right to access to effective health care is universal in nature and not dependent on citizenship, gender, age, faith, or other factors. While it was the Western world, which had been shaped by Christianity, which formed international law until long into the twentieth century, today’s international law is based on the global community which no longer includes sovereign nations but encompasses everybody. This text looks at the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights from a comparative cultural-religious perspective. The focus, though, is on the issue of universality and on the question how the universal approach found in Catholic Christianity has contributed to universality in modern human rights thinking, in particular when it comes to the right to access to effective health care. This then leads to the question of positive human rights obligations in the context of social responsibility.