Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-17T14:07:17.567Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Global Health, Vulnerable Populations, and Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Extract

The most common response to the challenge of protecting health through law is to focus on protecting the rights of vulnerable individuals and to enhance their access to health care. Each one of us is vulnerable or potentially vulnerable because of the fragile, existential nature of the human condition. Catastrophic and unexpected events could instantaneously transform us from a state of total independence and potential vulnerability to one of extreme vulnerability and complete dependence. Some legal provisions have the potential to provide a modicum of protection when we find ourselves in those situations (for example, through legislation, effective emergency health services can be created to reduce the impact of our potential vulnerability). There are also legal provisions that contribute to beneficial social circumstances; for example, legislation enabling universal access to medical care, and operationalizing respect for the individual’s right to health care, as advocated for by other authors in this issue.

Type
Symposium
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Benatar, S. R., “Global Disparities in Health and Human Rights: A Critical Commentary,” American Journal of Public Health 88, no. 2 (1998): 295300.Google Scholar
Edward, P., “The Ethical Poverty Line: A Moral Quantification of Absolute Poverty,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 2 (2006): 377393.Google Scholar
Birn, A.-E., “Addressing the Societal Determinants of Health: The Key Global Health Imperative of Our Times,” in Benatar, S. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011): at 37–52.Google Scholar
U.N. General Assembly, 2005 World Summit Outcome, U.N. Doc. A/Res/60/1, October 24, 2005, available at <http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/resguide/r60.htm> (last visited February 6, 2013).+(last+visited+February+6,+2013).>Google Scholar
Koivusalo, M., “Trade and Health: The Ethics of Global Rights, Regulation and Distribution,” in Benatar, S. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011): at 143–154.Google Scholar
McKeown, T. and Record, R. G., “Reasons for the Decline of Mortality in England and Wales during the Nineteenth Century,” Population Studies 16, no. 2 (1962): 94122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sachs, J., The Price of Civilization: Economics and Ethics after the Fall (Toronto: Random House, 2011).Google Scholar
Navarro, V., ed., Neoliberalism, Globalization and Inequalities: Consequences for Health and Quality of Life (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 2007).Google Scholar
Gill, S. and Bakker, I. C., “The Global Crisis and Global Health,” in Benatar, S. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2011): at 221–238.Google Scholar
Bakker, I. C. and Gill, S., eds., Production, Reproduction and Social Reproduction: Human (In)security in the Global Political Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rowden, R., The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF Has Undermined Public Health and the Fight against AIDS (London: Zed Books, 2009).Google Scholar
United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2002: Deepening Democracy in a Fragmented World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), available at <http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_2002_EN_Complete.pdf> (last visited February 6, 2013).+(last+visited+February+6,+2013).>Google Scholar
Stein, H., The World Bank and the IMF in Africa: Strategy and Routine in the Generation of a Failed Agenda, available at <http://w.macua.org/Howard_Stein.pdf> (last visited February 6, 2013).+(last+visited+February+6,+2013).>Google Scholar
See supra note 11.Google Scholar
See, e.g., Wolf, E. N., Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze – An Update to 2007, Levy Economics Institute Working Paper no. 589 (2010), available at <http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/?docid=1235> (last visited February 6, 2013).+(last+visited+February+6,+2013).>Google Scholar
Benatar, S. R. Gill, S., and Bakker, I. C., “Global Health and the Global Economic Crisis,” American Journal of Public Health 101, no. 4 (2011): 646653.Google Scholar
Zwi, A., “International Aid and Global Health,” in Benatar, S. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011): at 184–197.Google Scholar
Benatar, S. R., “Needs, Obligation, and International Relations for Global Health in the 21st century,” in Coggon, J. and Gola, S., eds., Global Health and International Community (London and New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).Google Scholar
Franklin, U., The Real World of Technology, Massey Lectures Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Lisk, F., Global institutions and the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: Responding to an International Crisis (London: Routledge, 2010).Google Scholar
U.N. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Substantive Issues Arising in the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: General Comment No. 14, U.N. Doc. E/C.12/2000/4 (August 11, 2000), available at <http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(symbol)/E.C.12.2000.4.En?OpenDocument> (last visited February 6, 2013). Forman, L. and Nixon, S., “Human Rights Discourse within Global Health Ethics,” in Pinto, A. D. and Upshur, R. E. G., eds., An Introduction to Global Health Ethics (London & New York, Routledge, 2013): 4757.Google Scholar
Benatar, S. R. and Doyal, L., “Human Rights Abuses: Toward Balancing Two Perspectives,” International Journal of Health Services 39, no. 1 (2009): 130159; Benatar, S. R., “Global Health & Human Rights: Working with the 20th Century Legacy,” Annual Human Rights Lecture, University of Alberta, May 2011, available at <http://www.uofaweb.ualberta.ca/humanrightslecture/> (last visited February 6, 2013).Google Scholar
Reich, R., Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).Google Scholar
Daar, A. and Singer, P., The Grandest Challenge: Taking Life-Saving Science from Lab to Village (Toronto: Doubleday, 2011) (emphasis added).Google Scholar
See Grand Challenges Canada, available at <http://www.grandchallenges.ca/> (last visited February 6, 2013).+(last+visited+February+6,+2013).>Google Scholar
Leroy, J. J. Habiicht, J. P. Pelto, G., and Bertozi, S. M., “Current Priorities in Health Research Funding and Lack of Impact on the Number of Child Deaths per Year,” American Journal of Public Health 97 (2007): 219–223 (cited in Pang, T., “Global Health Research: Changing the World Agenda,” in Benatar, S. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011]: 285292.).Google Scholar
Wiist, W. H., “Public Health and the Anticorporate Movement,” American Journal of Public Health 96, no. 8 (2006): 13701375.Google Scholar
Benatar, S. R., “Moral Imagination: The Missing Component in Global Health,” Public Library of Science Medicine 2, no. 12 (2005): e400.Google Scholar
Benatar, S. R. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benatar, D., “Animals, the Environment and Global Health,” in Benatar, S. R. and Brock, G., eds., Global Health and Global Health Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011): at 210–220.Google Scholar
Centre for International Sustainable Development Law, Montreal, available at <http://www.cisdl.org/about-the-cisdl.html> (last visited February 6, 2013).+(last+visited+February+6,+2013).>Google Scholar
See e.g. Galbraith, J. K., The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Galbraith, J. K., The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976); Galtung, J., True Worlds (New York: Free Press, 1980); Heilbroner, R., An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); Gill, S., “New Constitutionalism, Democratisation and Global Political Economy,” Pacifica Review 10, no. 1 (1998): 2338; Galbraith, J. K., The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); Wallerstein, I., The End of the World as We Know It: Social Science for the 21st Century (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Gill, S., ed., Global Crises and the Crisis of Global Leadership (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Oreskes, N. and Conway, E. M., “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” Daedalus 142, no. 1 (2013): 4058.Google Scholar