Widows - both child and adult in Tanzania, as in many other parts of the world, face discrimination on a regular basis. Such discrimination commonly destroys a woman's ability to live a life outside of poverty. In the face of the suffering and injustice widows endure throughout Africa, and...

A recent case from the English Court of Appeal (R (on the application of Condliff) v North Staffordshire Primary Care Trust [2011] EWCA Civ 910, concerning denial by a regional health care rationing committee of laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery for morbid obesity) demonstrates the problems of...

Each year an estimated 515 000 women die of complications of pregnancy and childbirth, 7 million more suffer serious health problems and 50 million suffer adverse health effects. Over 98% of deaths occur in resource-poor countries. However, poverty alone neither justifies nor necessarily...

The February 2016 WHO declaration that congenital Zika syndrome [CZS] constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern reacted to the outbreak of CZS in Brazil. Public health emergencies can justify a spectrum of human rights responses, but in Brazil the emergency exposed...

With the passage of Act 48 in May 2011, Vermont has become the first U.S. state to enact a law for a universal, publicly financed health care system. The state is on course for implementing a single payer system by 2017. This first breakthrough in the decades-long struggle for universal health...

Although the crisis of health care in the United States is widely acknowledged – marked by poor health outcomes, high costs, unequal access, and widening health inequities – its structural underpinnings have not been adequately addressed, and reformers have settled on promoting piecemeal...

The patenting of biotechnological inventions potentially affects human rights in a number of ways. Human rights to identity and the practice of religion may be affected by the availability of patents on genetically modified human beings (or elements of the human body). Patents as mechanisms for...

We are considering the relationship between human rights and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS). Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have always reflected a balancing of general public interests and private stakeholder interests, and in this sense IPRs take into...

With convergence-divergence as an organizing theme, this Article explores harm reduction and human rights as conceptual approaches to and discourses about unsafe abortion. The vehicle for this exploration is access to safer-use information on medication abortion, namely women’s...

This paper explores methods of achieving linkage in international law between the human right to health and the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) ). It explores the relevance to this question of international law’s...