Global Health and the Human Rights Imperative

Abstract

Open any magazine, click on a television news channel, or surf the net and you are likely to find global health highlighted as one of the foremost challenges of new millennium. First, this article will consider the meaning and measures of global health and detail the path to improved health and development prescribed by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Second, it will trace the development of international human rights law as it relates to health. Third, it demonstrate how human rights and health, long traversing parallel routes, are in fact converging in the 21st Century quest for global health - a quest that is simultaneously being driven by evolving international rights and norms related to trade, labor, the environment and human security. The article will conclude that global health and human rights are products of new international norms of governance borne of our interdependence and ongoing multilateral collaboration.

Keywords: global health, human rights, international law