Public Health and Human Rights: Evidence-Based Approaches

Human rights violations are underlying causes of adverse health outcomes for vulnerable people and populations around the world. Public Health and Human Rights provides critical, evidence-based assessments and tools with which to investigate the role of rights abrogation in the health of populations―from repressive laws to social discord, gender-based violence, human trafficking, and violations in conflict.

Divided into three sections, this provocative work investigates how the complex interactions between rights and health can best be studied, analyzed, and remedied; how the efforts of human rights advocates affect health outcomes; and how modern public health procedures can assist in documenting, understanding, and preventing human rights violations. Part I illuminates the powerful relationship between rights work and public health practice in Thailand, Russia, Burma, and China and in U.S. prisons. Part II explores new methodologies and new uses of previous practices for rights-based public health research. Part III confronts current policy approaches―such as Brazil's integration of rights, HIV/AIDS programming, and the contradictory and confounding global policies on illicit drugs―and offers recommendations for future programs and strategies.

Chris Beyrer, M.D., M.P.H., is a professor of epidemiology and international health, director of the Center for Public Health and Human Rights, and associate director of the Center for Global Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

H. F. Pizer is the cofounder and principal of Health Care Strategies, Inc., and author, coauthor, or editor of thirteen medical books.