HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS

This article discusses ways in which the analytical tools of public health can be used in conjunction with emerging theories of human rights to craft effective advocacy strategies, focusing particularly on women's reproductive health and reproductive rights. It notes that public health research, although often presented as an objective scientific inquiry, is actually a value-laden and therefore, highly political endeavor that should be used by advocates to elucidate the connections between women's health and the wider social, economic, and political conditions in which they live.

This article begins by assessing various social policy approaches to the AIDS epidemic and reviews the benefits of addressing AIDS through a social vulnerability framework. The author advocates utilizing a human rights approach as opposed to a public health approach to these issues. The second part of the article discusses how an appropriate response to gender and HIV/AIDS can be facilitated through the protections under existing human rights documents.

This article recommends an exchange between the human rights and public health fields by abandoning the traditional characterizations of rights as individualistic and health collectivist. In the author's approach, laws and policy become essential elements of a health analysis while the need for trade-offs is recognized in a rights analysis. The author uses case studies of trafficking, gender-based violence, internally displaced persons, sexual orientation and maternal mortality to explore similarities and differences between the health and human rights fields.

This article does not specifically address women's rights, but it sets out the status of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in national and international law. Examples in the article refer to international law provisions protecting the right to health. The author asserts that legally, politically, and morally, the UDHR remains even more significant today than when it was adopted in 1948. [Descriptors: Applying Human Rights Law - International, International]