A Guided Tour Through Key Principles and Issues of the Human Rights-Based Framework

Abstract

The paper starts with a tour de force that sets the parameters of the human rights framework for the neophyte to this topic. The human rights-based framework allows us to actively challenge the prevailing marginalization of the poor in society with all their preventable ill-health, malnutrition and deaths. The " invisible hand " of the market has simply no capacity to create a decent human rights-based society for all. There has been much circularity in the discussion of the right to health; now, more concrete actions need to be taken. How much of their budgets governments devote to health services and to poverty alleviation is of substantive human rights concern. Now is the time to convert these concepts into working programs and into people's empowerment for them to claim their right to health, i.e., our work has to yet acquire a more operational human rights meaning so as to empower the people we purport to serve. The challenge is a political one -and that is what this paper explores.