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This paper aims to identify human rights violations of patients during the early periods of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana by investigating the experiences of people on how health-care professionals discharged their responsibilities during the time in question.

Explanatory design of the mixed methods approach was adopted, with the intention of collecting both quantitative and qualitative data sequentially, and then integrating the results at the interpretation stage. The approach enriched the quality of data collected as it offered the advantage of shedding light on the primary motivations and reasons for attitudes and behaviours and helped to provide an in-depth understanding of how individuals interpret the happenings around them and their experiences. Thus, although some amount of quantitative method was used in the data collection, the core of this paper is based on the qualitative interpretations.

The study reveals that health-care professionals, especially those in the Tema Metropolis, undermined certain fundamental human rights of patients during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes failure to provide information to patients about treatment options and potential risks of medications; failure to seek the informed consent of patients before performing medical procedures; denial of access to medical files of patients for transfer; and inability or failure to provide medical ambulances services to patients on time.

Although many publications on human rights dimensions and health protective issues on COVID-19 pandemic are available on a global scale, still little information pertaining to experiences of individuals with health-care professionals during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in Ghana through the lens of patient’s rights exists. This paper, therefore, fills an important gap in health-care management information, critical for policy decision-making processes regarding patient’s rights in times of pandemic control.

Ideas of health-related deservingness in theory and practise have largely been attached to humanitarian notions of compassion and care for vulnerable persons, in contrast to rights-based approaches involving a moral-legal obligation to care based on universal citizenship principles. This paper aims to provide an alternative to these frames, seeking to explore ideas of a human rights-based deservingness framework to understand health care access and entitlement amongst precarious status persons in Canada.

Drawing from theoretical conceptualizations of deservingness, this paper aims to bring deservingness frameworks into the language of human rights discourses as these ideas relate to inequalities based on noncitizenship.

Deservingness frameworks have been used in public discourses to both perpetuate and diminish health-related inequalities around access and entitlement. Although, movements based on human rights have the potential to be co-opted and used to re-frame precarious status migrants as “undeserving”, movements driven by frames of human rights-based deservingness can subvert these dominant, negative discourses.

To date, deservingness theory has primarily been used to speak to issues relating to deservingness to welfare services. In relation to deservingness and precarious status migrants, much of the literature focuses on humanitarian notions of the “deserving” migrant. Health-related deservingness based on human rights has been under-theorized in the literature and the authors can learn from activist movements, precarious status migrants and health care providers that have taken on this approach to mobilize for rights based on being “human”.

Raises some questions on moral and legal rights to health care, referring to various claims contained within the report of the UK’s Commission on Social Justice – “Social Justice: Strategies for National Renewal” (1994). Explores the relationship between needs and rights – rights of action and rights of recipience, moral rights and legal rights. Proceeds to delve into the role the state plays in providing services such as health care and whether or not people have a moral right to good health and good health care. Questions if the state should provide health care and, if so, should it be provided as a legal right to citizens? Concludes that the Commission on Social Justice fails to defend the National Health Service on the grounds of justice and moral rights.

Psychiatric care for adult asylum seekers has been an area of conflict and turbulence in Sweden over the last 20 years. Sweden has been criticised for being one of the most restrictive EU countries in providing health care for asylum seekers. Mental health care for asylum seekers is characterised by short‐term emergency measures and inequality. The complex regulatory framework tends to be interpreted in a rather arbitrary fashion, which in many cases may lead to unnecessary restrictions. In this paper we present guidelines for care givers and decision makers aiming to improve psychiatric care for adult asylum seekers in Stockholm, Sweden. In this context it is necessary to highlight and discuss the importance of understanding and implementing human rights among health professionals. The overall goal for these guidelines is mental health care for asylum seekers on the same terms, as far as possible, as for Swedish citizens.

The child is at the centre of all Models of Child Health Appraised research and indeed all primary care delivery for children. Appraising models of primary care for children is incomplete without ensuring that experiences of primary care, design, treatment, management and outcomes are optimal for the child. However, the principle of child centricity is not implicit in many healthcare systems and in many aspects of life, yet it is extremely important for optimal child health service design and child health. By exploring the changing concept of ‘childhood’, we understand better the emergence of the current attitude towards children and their role in today’s Europe and the evolution of child rights. Understanding child centricity, and the role of agents acting on behalf of the child, allows us to identify features of children’s primary care systems that uphold the rights of a child to optimum health. This is placed against the legal commitments made by the countries of the European Union and European Economic Area to ensure that children’s rights are respected.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate key milestones in development of standards of human rights to health care in particular context of addressing palliative care, relevant efforts of advocacy in past decade and future area of growth.

In this study, analysis of human rights and its standards in context of palliative care has been provided through the lens of freedom from ill treatment and torture, right to health care and older persons’ and children’s rights.

Findings of this study highlighted significant developments in this area which include following: first treaty of human rights which explained right to palliative care; first resolution on palliative care by World Health Assembly; special rapporteur’s report focussed on denial of pain; and addressing issue of controlled medicine availability in special session of UN General Assembly.

Human rights standards and their development in context of palliative care have been most significant in relation to freedom from ill treatment and torture, right to health care and older persons’ rights. Further work is required in context of children’s rights and treaty bodies of human rights need to consistently address state obligations towards palliative care.

In 2006, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council was tasked to establish a new human rights monitoring mechanism: the universal periodic review process. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of discussions held in the process, over the two cycles of review in relation to women’s rights to access health care services.

This investigation is a documentary analysis of the reports of 193 United Nations’ state reports, over two cycles of review.

The primary findings of this investigation reveal that despite an apparent consensus on the issue, a deeper analysis of the discussions suggests that the dialogue between states is superficial in nature, with limited commitments made by states under review in furthering the protection of women’s right to access health care services in the domestic context.

Considering the optimism surrounding the UPR process, the findings reveal that the nature of discussions held on women’s rights to health care services is at best a missed opportunity to make a significant impact to initiate, and inform, changes to practices on the issue in the domestic context; and at worst, raises doubts as to whether the core aim of the process, to improve the protection and promotion of all human rights on the ground, is being fulfilled.

Deviating from the solely technocratic analysis of the review process in the existing literature, this investigation has considered the UPR process as a phenomenon of exploration in itself, and will provide a unique insight as to how this innovative monitoring mechanism operates in practice, with a particular focus on women’s right to access health care services.

This paper explores the health rights of prisoners as defined in international law, and the mechanisms that have been used to ensure the rights of persons in detention to realise the highest attainable standard of health. It examines this right as articulated within United Nations and regional human rights treaties, non‐binding or so‐called soft law instruments from international organisations and the jurisprudence of international human rights bodies. It explores the use of economic, social and cultural rights mechanisms, and those within civil and political rights, as they engage the right to health of prisoners, and identifies the minimum legal obligations of governments in order to remain compliant with human rights norms as defined within the international case law. In addressing these issues, this article adopts a holistic approach to the definition of the highest attainable standard of health. This includes a consideration of adequate standards of general medical care, including preventative health and mental health services. It also examines the question of environmental health, and those poor conditions of detention that may exacerbate health decline, disease transmission, mental illness or death. The paper examines the approach to prison health of the United Nations human rights system and its various monitoring bodies, as well as the regional human rights systems in Europe, Africa and the Americas. Based upon this analysis, the paper draws conclusions on the current fulfilment of the right to health of prisoners on an international scale, and proposes expanded mechanisms under the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment to monitor and promote the health rights of prisoners at the international and domestic levels.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the most prominent human rights violations during the COVID-19 pandemic in accordance with international human rights law.

Through doctrinal and legal study and content analysis, this paper analyses the important relevant legal provisions under International human rights law and applies these provisions to the reality of managing the COVID-19 crisis to identify the most prominent human rights violations during the COVID-19 outbreak. This research paper considered as a review paper in that it provides a review of the most prominent measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis, which constitutes violations of international human rights law.

It is concluded that some measures that have been taken by countries to confront the COVID-19 pandemic have constituted violations of human rights and did not comply with the legal conditions to restrict human rights. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown the ugly fractures in health-care systems, health inequities, racism and discrimination, Undermining the right to freedom of expression and the right to access information, gross negligence in protecting detainees from COVID-19 infection, all of these constitute clear violations of the principles of international human rights law.

The spread of COVID-19 has not stopped, and its effects still continue, including human rights violations. Therefore, this paper cannot enumerate all human rights violations that occur during the spread of COVID-19.

Based on the results in this paper, governments need to be more prepared to face any health crisis at all levels including health care, which would reduce human rights violations.

This research paper reflects positively on the social reality, as the adoption of its recommendations leads to the provision of adequate health care to all members of society in accordance with the principles of human rights, granting them the right to access information, protecting their right to freedom of expression, reducing the phenomenon of racism and discrimination and providing adequate health care to all detainees.

This paper studies an up-to-date topic that we are still living and seeing its effects. The benefit of this paper is to provide recommendations that protect human rights during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Doctors need to consider all kinds of traits and risk factors about a person in a treatment situation, while antidiscrimination law puts significant restrictions on what an employer can consider about a person in hiring. These two contexts – health care and the antidiscrimination-governed workplace – seem to adopt entirely incompatible conceptions of how to regard the person, and hence, what rights she is considered to deserve. Therefore, how can we make sense of the claim by fat acceptance advocates that doctors discriminate against them based on their weight? Even when little or no formal rights exist for fat citizens in either sphere, there are nonetheless transformative discourses available that cross-pollinate each context. Revisiting rights by bringing these two discordant contexts together helps illuminate problems of injustice that must be confronted in the future as we move toward a more universal and equitable health care system in which conceptions of rights must have some place.