Human Rights in Global Health
Rights-Based Governance for a Globalizing World

Institutions matter for the advancement of human rights in global health. Given the dramatic development of human rights under international law and the parallel proliferation of global institutions for public health, there arises an imperative to understand the implementation of human rights through global health governance. This volume examines the evolving relationship between human rights, global governance, and public health, studying an expansive set of health challenges through a multi-sectoral array of global organizations. To analyze the structural determinants of rights-based governance, the organizations in this volume include those international bureaucracies that implement human rights in ways that influence public health in a globalizing world. This volume brings together leading health and human rights scholars and practitioners from academia, non-governmental organizations, and the United Nations system. They explore the foundations of human rights as a normative framework for global health governance, the mandate of the World Health Organization to pursue a human rights-based approach to health, the role of inter-governmental organizations across a range of health-related human rights, the influence of rights-based economic governance on public health, and the focus on global health among institutions of human rights governance. Contributing chapters each map the distinct human rights efforts within a specific institution of global governance for health. Through the comparative institutional analysis in this volume, the contributing authors examine institutional dynamics to operationalize human rights in organizational policies, programs, and practices and assess institutional factors that facilitate or inhibit human rights mainstreaming for global health advancement.

Benjamin Mason Meier is an Associate Professor of Global Health Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Scholar at Georgetown Law School's O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, and a consultant to international organizations, national governments, and nongovernmental organizations. Dr. Meier's interdisciplinary research-at the intersection of global health, international law, and public policy-examines the development, evolution, and application of human rights in global health. Lawrence O. Gostin is University Professor (Georgetown University's highest academic rank), Founding O'Neill Chair in Global Health Law, and Director of the O'Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Professor Gostin is the Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law & Human Rights, and serves on expert WHO advisory committees. He is a Member of the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Sciences, Council on Foreign Relations, and Hastings Center.