Alicia Ely Yamin

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• JD MPH PhD
• Lecturer at Harvard University

During the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in governments and between individuals was associated with lower rates of infections and mortality. Thus, understanding the conditions under which public trust allows for the development of effective policymaking, regular revision, and voluntary mobilization for effective implementation in time...

During the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, trust in governments and between individuals was associated with lower rates of infections and mortality. Thus, understanding the conditions under which public trust allows for the development of effective policymaking, regular revision, and voluntary mobilization for effective implementation in time...

This article first describes shifts in human rights law that have led to improvements in the realization of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) over the last decade. The article does so, however, with careful attention to the structural factors beyond formal legal mechanisms that may undermine the ability of governments, even with the...

Global health financing needs to consider structural transformations beyond aid

In this text we will describe the historical path of use, in Brazil, of mallow (Urena lobata L.), a plant found in the national flora that is the perfect counterpart to jute (Corchorus olitorius L. and Corchorus capsularis L.), an exotic plant. The objective of this article is to produce knowledge about the process of using mallow to produce fibers...

Objective To examine the influence of varying articulations of the right to health under domestic constitutions, legislation and jurisprudence on the scope of legal protection for health. Methods We investigated legal recognition of the right to health, by conducting a three-level search. First, we searched databases containing constitutional text...

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enduring effect across the entire spectrum of law and policy, in areas ranging from health equity and racial justice, to constitutional law, the law of prisons, federal benefit programs, election law and much more. This collection provides a critical reflection on what changes the pandemic has already introduced, an...

In December of 2020, the Argentine Congress legalized abortion through 14 weeks, vastly increasing access to abortion care in the country. The law’s passage followed years of advocacy for abortion rights in Argentina - including mass public and civil society mobilization, vocal support from an established pool of abortion providers who offered abor...

In December of 2020, the Argentine Congress legalized abortion through 14 weeks, vastly

In December of 2020, the Argentine Congress legalized abortion through 14 weeks, vastly

After considerable progress in recent decades, maternal mortality and morbidity (MMM) either stagnated or worsened in most regions of the globe between 2016 and 2020. The world should be outraged given that we have known the key interventions necessary for preventing MMM for over three-quarters of a century. Since the 1990s, human rights advocacy o...

This Article situates the 2020 passage of a law legalizing abortion as an inflection point for Argentine democracy and a case study of how rights concepts can be deployed to advance reproductive justice. First, beginning with the transition to democracy, this study traces shifts in opportunity structures including political and institutional change...

This Article situates the 2020 passage of a law legalizing abortion as an inflection point for Argentine democracy and a case study of how rights concepts can be deployed to advance reproductive justice. First, beginning with the transition to democracy, this study traces shifts in opportunity structures including political and institutional change...

THE PROJECT Priority settings of health interventions take place in real world contexts. These consist of social and cultural practices and institutions and people who exercise power, subject themselves to the powers of others, place trust and mistrust and confer legitimacy, or not, to policy decisions. In this project, we aim to support the litera...

Objective During the last decades a vast body of literature has emerged on how to promote fair resource allocation of health resources (1-5). Accordingly, a broadly held view stresses the importance of achieving legitimacy in health prioritization to build trust, including processes based on reasonable values, transparency and inclusion (6). In thi...

The history of constitutional law in Latin America offers a mosaic of national histories, political experiments, and institutional transitions. No matter how distinctive and country-specific these histories and trends might be, this handbook shows that there are a set of commonalities that transcend the geographical contiguity of these countries. T...

This chapter focuses on the judicialization of health rights in Latin America. It begins by outlining the constitutional provisions in relation to health rights in five countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Mexico. It then turns to experiences with judicial enforcement of health rights in the region. After briefly setting out some...

In this chapter, we underscore the inextricable connections between democratic governance and population health, which is often treated as a purely technical matter to be determined by clinical expertise and health economists. First, we set out some of the implications of conceptualizing health as a right, arguing that defining the progressive real...

Although relatively little of Philip Alston’s scholarly or other work has been directly related to health, his enormous contribution to the clarification and development of economic and social rights (ESR) norms, as well as the linkages to development paradigms and practice, have greatly contributed to the field. Moreover, patterns of health are a...

Bringing together leading scholars, practitioners, and critics of human rights from a variety of disciplines, this book of essays takes as its inspiration and provocation, the forty-year career of Professor Philip Alston as an international human rights advocate, scholar, teacher, and influential participant in the making of the contemporary human...

Göran Tomson and colleagues argue that our ability to control pandemics requires global action to counter inequalities from demographic, environmental, technological, and other megatrends

The International Health Regulations (ihr), of which the World Health Organization is custodian, govern how countries collectively promote global health security, including prevention, detection, and response to global health emergencies such as the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. Countries are permitted to exercise their sovereignty in taking additiona...

What the world and our health systems and societies look like in the future depends on the meaning(s) we take from this pandemic, and in turn how we collectively respond. Before the pandemic, we were living in a scandalously unequal world in which one per cent owned as much wealth as the rest of the globe’s population. Worse yet, as Eduardo Galeano...

The International Health Regulations ( ihr ), of which the World Health Organization is custodian, govern how countries collectively promote global health security, including prevention, detection, and response to potential global health emergencies such as the ongoing covid -19 pandemic. While Article 44 of this binding legal instrument requires c...

Health rights are in many ways the most complex of rights to theorize and promote through advocacy, as they challenge views of what is natural and normal both in social and in bio-legitimated constructs, as well as demanding that we contest the boundaries of what have been considered the traditional realms of law and politics. Health is deeply and...

What the world and our health systems and societies look like in the future depends on the meaning(s) we take from this pandemic, and in turn how we collectively respond. Before the pandemic, we were living in a scandalously unequal world in which one per cent owned as much wealth as the rest of the globe's population. Worse yet, as Eduardo Galeano...

Book review of Foundations in Global Health and Human Rights (Gostin and Meier Eds)

Patterns of population health are keen reflections of structural inequities in societies, yet they are rarely subject to the requirements of democratic justification that other systemic inequalities provoke. Nor are health systems generally subject to societal scrutiny regarding fidelity to normative commitments of dignity and equality. Increased r...

Overcoming continuing polarization regarding judicial enforcement of health rights in Latin America requires clarifying divergent normative and political premises, addressing the lack of reliable empirical data, and establishing the conditions for fruitful inter-sectoral, inter-disciplinary dialogue.

Like other contributors to this special issue and beyond, I believe we are at a critical inflection point in human rights and need to re-energize our work broadly to address growing economic inequality as well as inequalities based on different axes of identity. In relation to the constellation of fields involved in 'health and human rights' specif...

Over twenty years after it began to take shape, the "health and human rights field" is a misnomer; it is not one field, but many. The application of human rights frameworks to health has been a critical part of the expansion of human rights to social and economic policies and in demonstrating the porousness and arbitrariness of divides between the...

There is no arena of human rights that presents more pitched drama than legal battles over sexual and reproductive rights (SRR). These battles have transcended international borders and threatened the stability and legitimacy of the international human rights system. Indeed, these legal battles regarding SRR ("lawfare") have become important domain...

Cambridge Core - Human Rights - Human Rights, Democracy, and Legitimacy in a World of Disorder - edited by Silja Voeneky

In 2011, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) issued a groundbreaking decision in the case of Alyne da Silva Pimentel Teixeira versus Brazil involving the maternal death of a young Afro‐Brazilian woman. The CEDAW addressed systemic failures in the Brazilian health system that combined to violate...

Peru is often highlighted as an example of the internationalization of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) norms, through supra-national litigation. Yet, the impact to petitioners and other similarly situated women in Peruvian society has fallen far short of expectations. This Article argues that the reasons underlying the need to use...

This chapter explores the evolution and struggles of the "health and human rights movement," focusing particularly on relevant developments in health and international law that enabled greater attention to the right to health. It discusses the evolution of human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health, which extended these legal concepts into the...

In that context, Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? (hereinafter Governing Global Health) is a well-written, accessible book that describes how a set of critically important institutions engage in global health functions, and it should be read by this burgeoning group of practitioners and students of global health alike.

Applying a robust human rights framework would change thinking and decision-making in efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC), and advance efforts to promote women’s, children’s, and adolescents’ health in East Africa, which is a priority under the Sustainable Development Agenda. Nevertheless, there is a gap between global rhetoric of hu...

Progressive realisation is invoked as the guiding principle for countries on their own path to universal health coverage (UHC). It refers to the governmental obligations to immediately and progressively move towards the full realisation of UHC. This paper provides procedural guidance for countries, that is, how they can best organise their processe...

This article seeks to fill a gap between legal discussions regarding the normative content of the right to health and public health and development discussions about health system reform and Universal Health Coverage [UHC]. It sets out conceptual implications of defining health as a right, for health and health systems, and in turn for the involvem...

As health policy-makers around the world seek to make progress towards universal health coverage, they must navigate between two important ethical imperatives: to set national spending priorities fairly and efficiently; and to safeguard the right to health. These imperatives can conflict, leading some to conclude that rights-based approaches presen...

s book Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity is necessary reading for advocates, practitioners, and students from any discipline interested in understanding the intersection between human rights and health. It underlines the importance of applying a rights-based framework to health systems, policies, and laws that cause suffering, social i...

In her much-celebrated novel The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood created a society where women's function was reduced to breeding, and those who failed or tried to escape from this labor were labeled as "Unwomen" and punished. 1 Atwood's 1985 book may have been science fiction, but the story she tells is distressingly not too dissimilar from women...

Directed at a diverse audience of students, legal and public health practitioners, and anyone interested in understanding what human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) to health and development mean and why they matter, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity provides a solid foundation for comprehending what a human rights framework implies an...

Objectives The full impact of a maternal death includes consequences faced by orphaned children. This analysis adds evidence to a literature on the magnitude of the association between a woman’s death during or shortly after childbirth, and survival outcomes for her children. Methods The Ifakara and Rufiji Health and Demographic Surveillance Sit...

As more states incorporate health-related rights into their national constitutions, judges are increasingly being asked to enforce access to entitlements as well as to regulate the conduct of executive branches in relation to health. Decisions made by judicial bodies in the context of health rights litigation have far-reaching consequences, not onl...

Maternal mortality in South Africa is high and a cause for concern especially because the bulk of deaths from maternal causes are preventable. One of the proposed reasons for persistently high maternal mortality is HIV which causes death both indirectly and directly. While there is some evidence for the impact of maternal death on children and fami...

Maternal mortality, although largely preventable, remains unacceptably high in developing countries such as Malawi and creates a number of intergenerational impacts. Few studies have investigated the far-reaching impacts of maternal death beyond infant survival. This study demonstrates the short- and long-term impacts of maternal death on children,...

The consequences of maternal mortality on orphaned children and the family members who support them are dramatic, especially in countries that have high maternal mortality like Ethiopia. As part of a four country, mixed-methods study (Ethiopia, Malawi, South Africa, and Tanzania) qualitative data were collected in Butajira, Ethiopia with the aim of...

Maternal mortality remains the leading cause of death and disability for reproductive-age women in resource-poor countries. The impact of a mother's death on child outcomes is likely severe but has not been well quantified. This analysis examines survival outcomes for children whose mothers die during or shortly after childbirth in Butajira, Ethiop...

Maternal mortality, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and child survival are closely linked. This study contributes evidence on the impact of maternal death on children's risk of dying in an HIV-endemic population in rural South Africa. We used data for children younger than 10 years from the Agincourt health and socio-demographic surveillance system (1992 -...

Driven by the need to better understand the full and intergenerational toll of maternal mortality (MM), a mixed-methods study was conducted in four countries in sub-Saharan Africa to investigate the impacts of maternal death on families and children. The present analysis identifies gender as a fundamental driver not only of maternal, but also child...

One of the most significant transformations to occur in the landscape of struggles for health justice since this journal was originally launched relates to the increasing judicialization of health-related rights, and economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC rights) more broadly. Indeed, the articles in this issue go far toward debunking outdated...

Objective: To demonstrate the burden of maternal deaths on children, family, and community in order to raise awareness of the true costs of maternal mortality and poor maternal health care in Neno, a very rural, district, in Malawi. Data/Methods: Qualitative in-depth interview data was collected to assess a range of outcomes affecting child well-...

Whether the future ‘sustainable development’ framework advances the rights of the immiserated around the globe will depend not just on the language in the global documents. It will crucially depend upon how meaningfully human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) are implemented in practice. We argue here that dilemmas arise from two principal contradict...