Registration is Open for the Global School on Socioeconomic Rights: Course on Health Rights Litigation

Application Deadline is July 1, 2014

The Global School on Socioeconomic Rights: Course on Health Rights Litigation will be held November 3-5, 2014. Applications are due to rcantor@hsph.harvard.edu by July 1, 2014. Read more about the Global School on Socioeconomic Rights: 2014 Course on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Litigation and access the application.

The last fifteen years have seen a tremendous growth in the number of health rights cases. Yet questions still persist as to when and how litigation can lead to greater social justice in health and enhance the functioning of health systems. In many countries people view litigation as an expensive, technical, and difficult process. The resulting lack of legal challenges weakens the enforcement of health-related laws, leaving people unable to promote their own health rights and manage their own health risks. It also allows for gross inequities in the distribution of resources for health, including a lack of attention to vulnerable groups.

Participants during a session of the 2013 Global School.
Participants during a session of the 2013 Global School.

To address these ongoing challenges, the HRWC Program, in conjunction with the Global School on Socioeconomic Rights, leads a one-week intensive training course for academics, students, and practitioners in strategic litigation relating to health rights, and in particular the health rights of women and children. This one-week intensive course offers participants an opportunity to develop specialist-level knowledge in relation to litigating health-related rights at the national, regional, and international levels. Topics covered include: sexual and reproductive health and rights; rights issues arising in health-care settings; palliative care; approaches to health-care rationing and factors to consider in assessing the equity impacts of judgments; access to medicines and intellectual property; judicial legitimacy in deciding issues with budgetary and policy implications; and judicial effectiveness and impact of judgments. In June 2012, HRWC hosted practitioners from 23 countries for the inaugural course at Harvard. The second session of the course was held in September 2013 and the forty-four participants represented twenty-four countries from regions around the world. In conjunction with the course, Health and Human Rights, the FXB Center’s peer-reviewed open access journal under the editorship of Paul Farmer, Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, will release a special issue on health rights litigation, which will be guest edited by Alicia Ely Yamin, Lecturer on Global Health and Director of HRWC. Participants in the course will have the opportunity to submit papers related to the health rights litigation topics addressed during the course.

In 2014, the Global School course will focus exclusively on sexual and reproductive rights (SRR) litigation, including such topics as: abortion, criminalization of sex work, litigating LGBT rights in varied contexts, access to sexual and reproductive health entitlements, and working with marginalized groups in doing SRR advocacy. The three-day intensive course, held November 3-5, 2014 at Harvard University in Boston, MA, will enable participants to develop specialist-level knowledge in relation to litigating on sexual and reproductive health and rights at national and international levels, as well as afford ample opportunities for engaging in discussions and network building with practitioners from across the globe. Instructors include leading practitioners and judges from around the world, as well as scholars from the field.

Participants in the Harvard SRR litigation course this year will also be invited to attend a two-day international symposium on “Sexual and Reproductive Rights ‘Lawfare’ in International Tribunals” which will be held at Harvard University on November 6-7, and will draw leading experts from around the world to discuss the dynamics as well as the normative and empirical impacts of using international tribunals and forums in relation to controversial SRR issues.

The course is conducted in English, is highly participatory, and uses case studies extensively. Last year’s course included participants from twenty-four different countries worldwide. The course is designed for PhD students, scholars, practitioners (e.g., law, public health, human rights or development), policy-makers and advanced master’s students. The number of participants is restricted, and fellowships are limited.