A free nanocourse* on health and human rights will be held at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in July 2015. The short course will focus on the region sometimes referred to as the “Global South”: Latin and South America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Most states in the Global South have ratified international human rights treaties that recognize the right to health. However, in practice…
June 23, 2015. When he was just over a year old, Rahel noticed that her little boy, Ali, did not behave like other children. He liked to be alone, spending hours and hours in front of the television or staring at nothing at all. She tried playing games with him, but he didn’t seem to notice. When she called, he didn’t answer. He didn’t speak, or look others in the…
By Dr. Bernd Franke June 19, 2015. In December 2014, local residents of Llaushë/Lauša village, in the city of Skenderaj in northern Kosovo, approached the Department of Forensic Medicine and reported a possible mass grave in the village cemetery. Four bodies had been buried there in the late nineties, during the Kosovo War, they said. In late April of this year, forensic experts from the European Union Rule of Law…
by Jacqueline Bhabha June 15, 2015. What is the connection between early childhood and peace? Can attention to early childhood development be a pathway to peacemaking and peacebuilding? This was the ambitious topic of an international conference in Istanbul on June 10, organized by ACEV, an innovative, well-known Turkish mother and child development program, UNICEF, and Yale University. Speakers explored a very broad range of topics related to this expansive theme.…
By Jacqueline Bhabha June 8, 2015. Last week I attended a two-day colloquium at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as one of a group of about 30 experts invited to discuss a draft General Comment (GC) to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.[i] The topic: adolescence. The diverse group debated a wide range of issues, central among which were how to define…
Harvard FXB, by invitation from Open Society Foundations (OSF), has developed the 5th edition of the Health and Human Rights Resource Guide. The Resource Guide has been designed to be a user-friendly, multi-purpose tool in advocating for health and human rights with a wide array of users, including health workers, trainers, program designers, litigators, and policymakers. The Resource Guide covers basic concepts in health and human rights. The introduction provides…
Program Goals The Health, Human Rights, and Social Justice program, founded and directed by Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, is informed by the view that the lack of global progress on women’s and children’s health is not principally due to technical obstacles, but rather to entrenched societal barriers and lack of political will at both the national and international levels. Solutions that ignore root causes and underlying inequalities and power…
Program Goals The Gender and Adolescent Agency program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights investigates the factors impinging on educational access for marginalized, Indian adolescent girls, as part of a more general inquiry into agency and empowerment. The goal of the program is to probe the enduring challenge of female educational disadvantage in India in order to generate an evidence base for enhancing the access of disadvantaged…
Program Goals The Social Justice and the Right to Health program, founded and directed by Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, is informed by the view that the lack of global progress on women’s and children’s health is not principally due to technical obstacles, but rather to entrenched societal barriers and lack of political will at both the national and international levels. Solutions that ignore root causes and underlying inequalities and…
June 3, 2015. We now know that the toll of maternal death is far higher than generally assumed. This means that the drop in maternal mortality seen in some countries over the past decade is not by itself sufficient measure of the success of efforts to prioritize maternal health on the global health agenda. Maternal death is not just about mothers. “Tracing Shadows: How Gendered Power Relations Shape the Impacts…
