Jonathan Mann wrote in 1998 that ‘the human rights framework offers public health a more coherent, comprehensive, and practical framework for analysis and action on the societal root causes of vulnerability to HIV than any framework inherited from traditional public health or biomedical science.’
Twenty years later, human rights (HR) are understood to be essential to all aspects of the prevention and care for vulnerable individuals who have and who are at risk of communicable diseases such as HIV, TB, and hepatitis C. The incorporation of HR into care and prevention programming for HIV disease, for example, has been critical to global success in the HIV epidemic. An innovative science is emerging in the design and implementation of interventions based on principles, insights, and interventions that are based on human rights, as well as new metrics to measure progress in advances in HR and public health.
Two key features of this new science are its multi-disciplinary nature, involving law, medicine, social science, community activism, public health, political science, and the arts and humanities; and the active engagement of the vulnerable populations in all aspects of planning and implementation.
This new science has applicability well beyond HIV and now includes TB, infectious hepatitis, and other communicable diseases. Human rights are also informing other types of public health interventions in other vulnerable populations, such as women’s health and maternal-child health, environmental health, and health care in prisons and in humanitarian crises.
The workshop is designed to offer a review of human rights-based interventions in a variety of settings and with a variety of vulnerable populations. Included among these will be:
- HIV prevention and care among men who have sex with men in Chicago;
- TB prevention and care among affected individuals in India and China;
- HIV prevention among young women in sub-Saharan Africa; and
- HIV and hepatitis prevention and care among drug users in China and in the US
The objectives of the workshop are:
1. To review human rights-based interventions among varied vulnerable populations, with particular attention to new metrics by which to measure progress; and
2. To identify innovations and common themes in HR-based health interventions and metrics on which to design and expand future actions in health and human rights.
Each speaker will provide an overview of their experience with human rights-based approaches, with special attention to major programmatic successes or failures, and to innovations in program implementation and/or outcomes measures.
After each presentation, there will be time for discussion and clarification. At the end of the workshop, a brief summary of the innovations, new metrics, successes and failures of HR innovations, and other findings of the workshop will be presented.