Justice Mandate Research Articles

Health Diplomacy: lessons for global health from PEPFAR

Health diplomacy has become an increasingly important strategy for the US in the less developed world. PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) provides lessons for future global health initiatives. Technical leadership, accountability, and the future of the US global diplomacy work force are discussed. In a world of increased global health risks, economic disparities between nations and profound challenges to national security, global health programs have become an important part of the diplomacy. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is a US health diplomacy effort, perhaps the largest ever undertaken -with well documented successes and limitations -provides lessons for future global health initiatives. 1 Other global investments in HIV/AIDS have failed due to weak or inexperienced bureaucracies. 2 Building on PEPFAR, the Obama administration has proposed to increase the US investment in global health to $63 billion. 3 A role of health diplomacy has been recommended in the fight against radical Islamasists. 4 While political influence on foreign assistance have often been cited as a cause for failures, divorcing the global health action of national from diplomacy is rarely possible. 5 There are three rationales for health diplomacy which were part of the original conceptualization for PEPFAR which worked to bridge the differences between diplomatic and health efforts. 6 Morbidity and mortality are inequitably distributed across the globe and principles of beneficence and justice mandate humanitarian action. Second we must protect ourselves from diseases arising in other countries, which include prevention, and treatment of illness as well as efforts to build infrastructure abroad necessary to contain outbreaks. Finally, there is the growing recognition that poor health and inadequate health care in populations lead to destabilization which make our world more dangerous, setting back advancement of our national security and other priorities. These perspectives were reaffirmed by the Institute of Medicine in a recent report on global health. 7 Box 1 The President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, commonly known as PEPFAR, was created by an act of the US Congress in 2003 supporting by US$15 billion.

Collective bargaining and equality: Making connections

The ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work adopted in 1998 could not be clearer: “the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining” and “the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation” (ILO, 1998, Para. 2 (a) and (d)) are both so central to the ILO’s social justice mandate and Decent Work Agenda that they are two of the four fundamental principles which Members of the ILO have a “good faith obligation … to respect, to promote and to realize”. Both are among the immutable principles embodied in the ILO Constitution and represent robust standards of egalitarian and democratic inspiration that stress the centrality of enfranchisement within the world of work, reflected in the ILO’s Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98), and the Discrimination (Employment and Occupation) Convention, 1958 (No. 111). For generations, both these principles have been dynamically interpreted and applied by the ILO’s supervisory machinery. And now, with the adoption of the ILO Declaration, both are urgently reaffirmed by the ILO and its Members “in a situation of growing economic interdependence” (ILO, 1998, Preamble, para. 7) as essential components to promote a vision of “sustainable development” that sees the economic and the social as mutually reinforcing. Despite the ILO’s longstanding commitment to collective bargaining and the elimination of discrimination, initiatives to explore the interface between the two principles have only recently emerged, and have focused overwhelmingly on gender equality. The ILO Declaration resists the impulse to establish a hierarchy between collective bargaining and equality, merely setting these principles apart from the broader range of labour standards. In an increasingly integrated transnational context that challenges traditional labour regulation structures, the time is now ripe to investigate the complex and changing relationship between these two fundamental principles and rights at work. The starting-point for this article is that, despite an overwhelming rate of ratification of Convention No. 98, effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining remains elusive for the vast majority of workers. Globally, only a minority of workers benefit from the free and fair representation of their collective rights, needs and interests. Unequal access to collective bargaining shows how far dominant paradigms of collective bargaining have failed to reflect the plural structures of work, notably in the informal economy and in the developing world. Moreover, emerging post-Fordist paradigms pose difficult challenges to the founding concepts on which twentieth-century industrial relations were constructed.

The Economics and Ethics of Minimum Wage Legislation

Recent empirical studies have led the economics profession to question the proposition that minimum wage legislation necessarily leads to greater unemployment. This paper extends the analysis of these studies by providing several theoretical reasons why these empirical results may reflect a larger truth. Moreover, it addresses a relatively neglected aspect of the minimum wage debate - its ethical dimensions. Specifically, do the elementary principles of economic justice mandate that employees who “play by the rules”, should earn a “living wage”? This paper argues that the minimum wage is a successful economic policy that is consistent with economic justice.

Rethinking the Sanctioning Function in Juvenile Court: Retributive or Restorative Responses to Youth Crime

Although juvenile courts have always administered punishment to youthful offenders, parens patriae and the individual treatment mission have historically assigned an ambivalent role to sanctioning. In the absence of a coherent sanctioning framework, a punitive model has recently gained dominance over dispositional decision making in juvenile court. This article examines the limitations of sanctioning choices presented by both the individual treatment mission and what some have referred to as a “retributive justice” paradigm. We then consider the implications of an alternative model—restorative justice—as a framework for a new approach to sanctioning consistent with a revitalized juvenile justice mandate.