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So many Afghans have not given up on a better future
by Shaharzad Akbar, Malala Yousafzai
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Nelson Mandela Foundation, agencies
 
Shaharzad Akbar is an Afghan human rights activist who served as the chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission until the beginning of 2022. Alena Bieling interviewed Shaharzad on receiving the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Human Rights Award 2023
 
You have recently been awarded the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) Human Rights Award 2023, which honours your unwavering commitment to human rights in Afghanistan. Can you tell us what the living situation is currently like in the country?
 
When looking at the situation in Afghanistan, the first thing that we have to do is to emphasise the fact that women are systematically deprived of their fundamental rights across the country. Girls are deprived of the right to attend secondary school, women can’t go to university, they are banned from most sectors with the exception of health and education. Women are banned from working in NGOs and the United Nations, making Afghanistan the only country in the world where girls cannot go to school.
 
The UN has said that they have never faced a situation in which they were told to not employ women. Afghan activists have called the situation a ‘gender apartheid’ because of its widespread and systematic violation of women’s rights on the basis of their gender.
 
The human rights situation more broadly is also very concerning. The Taliban have abolished most existing laws but failed to introduce new ones, creating a state of lawlessness in which arbitrary decisions by any Taliban judge, in fact, becomes the law. This has made it very difficult for people to access justice, in particular for women, since they have been completely removed from the judiciary.
 
The laws protecting women and children have also been abolished, as well as other laws aligned with international human rights, such as the anti-torture legislation. Moreover, there are no redress mechanisms, therefore victims of violations perpetrated by the Taliban have nowhere to go.
 
Your work has been heavily focused on democratic development, advocacy and women’s rights in Afghanistan. Where do you see the biggest challenges facing your country today?
 
The Afghan civil society has been heavily suppressed and the media is being censored. There is absolutely no space for activism, the promotion of democracy or any other form of civic resistance against the Taliban.
 
Protestors face brutal suppression, as well as harassment and detention, which also pose a threat to their family members. And if you want to document the human rights violations in Afghanistan, you will have a lot of difficulties because the Taliban have made access to information very difficult. For Afghan women, being a human rights defender is even less of a possibility, because women are not allowed to leave the house without being accompanied by a male guardian. Thus, I would say that being a human rights defender in Afghanistan right now means being treated like a criminal and even putting your life at risk.
 
From your experience, how has the situation changed in the past decades? What are the main differences to life in Afghanistan 35 years ago?
 
We had over four decades of war, so some elements of instability and violence have unfortunately been there for as long as I have lived – and even before that. And, at least in the two decades post international intervention in Afghanistan, conflicts, as well as corruption, were major issues. This has had a huge impact on the country. It has meant continuous waves of migration, continued brain drain and an inability to develop our institutions with continuity.
 
Yet, prior to the Taliban takeover, there was at least some space for improving things, including laws and institutions, as well as for educating new generations of Afghan women and girls and trying to rebuild the country. This was interrupted by the Taliban’s war against the government and the international forces.
 
What we have right now is a backsliding that is so massive it will take a long time to undo, particularly when it comes to girls’ education.
 
Because every day lost is a day that you cannot recover. And girls have been deprived of education for over two years now. We are a poor country that has been at war for a very long time. My concern is that we’ll have continuous and worsening poverty if women remain completely excluded from education and work.
 
And if these discriminatory policies continue, they will, in turn, refuel the conflict. Thus, while in terms of actual violence, things seem a bit quieter now, the outlook for the future is very bleak.
 
What can the European Union and other international actors do to help improve the living situation of the people/women on the ground?
 
One of the things that the international community can do is to decide on a common position on how they want to engage with the Taliban and what their priorities are. Because the Taliban are very happy to deal with countries bilaterally rather than with a bloc of countries that can exert more pressure on them. For some countries, the current priorities are the human rights situation, as well as long-term peace and justice. But for others, their priority is very narrowly defined as ‘counterterrorism’ with no real long-term outlook.
 
International actors can also sustain and increase humanitarian aid. The situation in Afghanistan is very dire, and there is a massive amount of needs. It is also important to improve oversight of how aid is being distributed — there are concerns about how much of the aid is actually being rechannelled, misused or wasted. And then, of course, there is the issue of resettlement for Afghans at risk. Many of the resettlement plans announced haven’t moved quickly or efficiently enough, and there are many vulnerable people who fall beyond the scope of these programs. That means we are complicit in putting human rights defenders at risk of being silenced by the Taliban since we are not offering other opportunities for them to continue their advocacy work.
 
Do you consider the question of whether governments should actually cooperate with the Taliban valid?
 
For humanitarian organisations to be able to continue delivering humanitarian aid, we need a degree of engagement. When thinking of isolating the Taliban, you want to make sure not to isolate the Afghan people in the process. So, I think that one of the solutions is to have principled engagement, a common set of values around which those countries engage.
 
We have to ask ourselves: do we want the Taliban’s policies discriminating against women and girls? Do China, Pakistan or Germany want this? The question then is how can we work together to get closer to tackling this? But if China is only interested in counterterrorism, Germany is only interested in containing refugees, and Pakistan is only interested in economy and trade – and for all of them, women and girls’ rights have become second or third issues – then it will be hard to have any impact or leverage at all.
 
What are some takeaways for the Global North from what happened in Afghanistan?
 
I think one of the main takeaways should be to exhaust every single measure before trying a military intervention. And when a military intervention does indeed take place, the international community needs to uphold the principles or values that they say they are there for. First and foremost, in fighting violations, you are not allowed to commit more violations yourself. This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan. There was a culture of impunity, and allegations of abuse by the Afghan army, as well as the international forces, which were not seriously investigated. There were serious allegations of corruption, again not just by Afghans but also by the American contractors.
 
And if you let these things fester, they can collapse a regime. Just because you are dealing with so-called terrorists, this doesn’t mean that you can do whatever you please — for it’s going to come back and haunt you. The way things ended in Afghanistan is another lesson — the lack of consideration of the implications of the decisions that were taken for 30 million Afghans. It was also very disappointing to see that, when the US was leading the so-called peace process, Europe was mainly following. Europe had invested in Afghanistan for over 20 years, yet, it still couldn’t even voice a strongly worded objection. So, yes, I think there are a lot of lessons learned.
 
With the current surge of violence globally, Afghanistan has largely gone unnoticed. What would you like the world to know about the current situation in Afghanistan?
 
It is really important to realise that there is no other way to describe what’s going on in Afghanistan but as gender apartheid. It is a massive systematic exclusion and humiliation of women, presenting women as less-than-human, secondary citizens. This is a level of human rights violation that cannot be in the interest of any society anywhere in the world — or for international security. Thus, paying attention to what’s going on in Afghanistan and trying to advocate with governments to do more, to work together and truly prioritise these issues, is very important. I know that there are many urgent issues right now that require our attention and resources. But I do believe that we have it in us to deal with more than one issue at a time.
 
It’s also important to remember that there are many ways in which people are resisting these injustices, particularly women. We hear about women who go to sit-in protests or gather in their homes to protest, women who form book clubs or teach girls in secret. There are many ways in which women are trying to run businesses and feed their families, trying to defy the Taliban’s policies in any way they can to have a public presence.
 
I think this is important to acknowledge — the fact that so many Afghans have not given up on a better future for themselves. The message can only be then that we certainly cannot give up either.
 
http://www.ips-journal.eu/interviews/so-many-afghans-have-not-given-up-on-a-better-future-7171/ http://unama.unmissions.org/unama-deeply-concerned-over-detentions-afghan-women-and-girls-0
 
Dec. 2023
 
The Nelson Mandela Foundation honoured the 10th anniversary of Madiba’s passing on 5 December 2023 with the 21st instalment of the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai as the speaker, below is an extract from her speech:
 
"I know I am here to give a lecture, but you all know me – I will always be a student first. It is as students that we first open our eyes to injustice. It is as students that we first ask difficult questions about the world. It is as students that we first find friends who embolden us to speak out. So when I thought about what I want to share with you today, and what it means to lead for a just future, I approached the assignment not as a lecturer but as a student.
 
And with Mandela’s legacy in mind, I asked myself: what injustice is the world overlooking? Where are we allowing inhumanity to become the status quo? The answer for me was very clear, and very personal: the oppression of girls and women in Afghanistan.
 
My family and I know what it feels like to live under the Taliban ideology. At 11, I was banned from school. At 15, I was shot and nearly killed for standing up for my right to receive an education. We were always looking over our shoulders.
 
Nelson Mandela and his fellow South Africans knew that feeling well. And their resilience and collective action in the face of injustice can inspire us.
 
Just two years ago, women in Afghanistan were working, serving in leadership positions, running ministries, travelling freely. Girls of all ages were playing soccer and cricket, and learning in schools. Though all was not perfect, there was progress. And fundamentally, girls and women had opportunities, they had choice, they had agency.
 
Then, the Taliban seized power a second time. As they did in the 1990s, they quickly began the systematic oppression of girls and women. For a short time, this made headlines. But since then, the world has turned its back on the Afghan people.
 
Maybe this reflects the sheer number of crises the world is facing: Violence and displacement in Sudan … Famine in Yemen … The climate crisis being debated right now at COP28 … War in Ukraine … And of course, the unjust bombardment of Gaza … where a child is killed every 10 minutes. So much of humanity is wounded. But we cannot allow ourselves to buy into this false notion that we can only care about one crisis at a time. We must be able to hold space for suffering wherever it is happening in the world.
 
So today, I would like to bring attention back to the girls of Afghanistan, whose suffering has been sidelined. Our first imperative is to call the regime in Afghanistan what it really is. It is gender apartheid. We know that gender-based discrimination exists in every country. Gender-based persecution exists in many countries. But gender apartheid is different.
 
Apartheid is a system that is imposed and enforced by those in power – the very people who are supposed to protect their citizens. In South Africa, defenders of such a system insisted that it was somehow the natural order of things to segregate whites from non-whites. Similarly, in Afghanistan, the Taliban say that oppressing girls and women is a matter of religion.
 
So let me say this as plainly as possible: that is not only an excuse, but it is also not true. Many Muslim scholars, including from Afghanistan, have made clear that Islam does not condone denying girls and women their right to education and to work. But the Taliban are not interested in the truth. They are interested in maintaining power. And they will use any excuse, from culture to security, to justify their actions.
 
In the name of their false vision, they have introduced more than 80 decrees and edicts restricting girls’ and women’s rights. If you are a girl in Afghanistan, the Taliban has decided your future for you. You cannot attend secondary school or university. You cannot find an open library where you can read.
 
You see your mothers and your older sisters confined and constrained in a similar way. They cannot leave the house on their own. Not to work. Not to go to the park. Not to get a haircut. Not to even see a doctor. And the punishment for doing these very ordinary, everyday things is severe: indefinite detention. Forced marriage. Beating. Death.
 
In effect, the Taliban have made girlhood illegal. And it is taking a toll. Girls kept out of school are experiencing depression and anxiety.Some are turning to narcotics, attempting suicide. No girl, anywhere in the world, should have to suffer this way.
 
If we, as a global community, accept the Taliban’s edicts, we are sending a devastating message to girls everywhere: that they are less human. That your rights are up for debate. That we are willing to look away.
 
There is another reason to call this gender apartheid. Apartheid is more than a description; it is a legal concept. South Africans fought for racial apartheid to be recognised and criminalised at the international level. In the process, they drew more of the world’s attention to the horrors of apartheid. More people joined the anti-apartheid campaign, driving political and cultural change. By defining systemic oppression in legal terms, they named it and made it easier to enlist allies against it.
 
But gender apartheid has not been explicitly codified yet. That is why I call on every government, in every country, to make gender apartheid a crime against humanity. We have an opportunity to do that right now. The UN is currently drafting and debating a new Crimes Against Humanity Treaty. This is the moment for world leaders to stand with Afghan girls and women. Adding and adopting language on gender apartheid to the treaty will codify it under international law.
 
Member states like South Africa can play an important role in championing this cause. This legal approach might seem disconnected from everyday lives and human suffering. But international law is not an abstraction. It is a practical tool. It is a way to protect the oppressed. It is a way to hold the Taliban to account – and to hold anyone who helps them, legally complicit.
 
And, as we saw with South Africa, it can spur and strengthen collective action. In these ways, codification will help prevent gender apartheid from happening elsewhere. It will send a strong message of support to the girls and women of Afghanistan who have been demanding this: that we hear them. That we will not let them fight alone".
 
http://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/full-transcript-21st-nelson-mandela-annual-lecture
 
* After August: A collection of stories documenting the lives of Afghan women is a collaboration between UN Women Afghanistan, Zan Times, Limbo and independent storytellers: http://www.afteraugust.org/
 
http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/afghanistan-talibans-arbitrary-arrests-and-detention-women-and-girls-over http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/gender-apartheid-must-be-recognised-crime-against-humanity-un-experts-say http://news.un.org/en/story/2024/02/1146177 http://unama.unmissions.org/reports-womens-rights-women-peace-and-security http://tinyurl.com/yc82tzen http://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/06/taliban-and-global-backlash-against-womens-rights http://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/14/out-sight-afghans-are-going-hungry http://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/afghanistan-humanitarian-needs-and-response-plan-2024-december-2023


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Economic Inequality and the Right to Health
by Gillian MacNaughton and A. Kayum Ahmed
Health & Human Rights Journal
 
Dec. 2023
 
The emergence of neoliberalism 50 years ago has led to a marked increase in economic inequality and an undermining of economic, social, and cultural rights. The papers in this special section examine the role of neoliberal policies in exacerbating economic inequality, while at the same time considering how these policies deliberately prevent efforts to progressively realize the right to health.
 
Drawing on international human rights, several papers also propose actions to reduce economic inequality and create conditions favorable for realizing the right to health and human rights more generally.
 
The Global Wealth Report 2022 “estimated that the bottom 50% of adults in the global wealth distribution together accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth at the end of 2021. In contrast, the richest decile (top 10% of adults) own[ed] 82% of global wealth.”
 
Further, Oxfam reported in 2023 that globally, over the past two years, the wealthiest have become much wealthier, while at the same time, “poverty has increased for the first time in 25 years.”
 
Neoliberal policies have actively embraced free market capitalism and economic inequality and rejected ideas of solidarity by restructuring economies, privatizing, deregulating, reducing taxes on the wealthy, and transferring the obligations of states to private entities.
 
All governments make political choices in allocating funding to and within the health sector. They decide whether to meet their right to health obligations as well as their international human rights duty to ask for or offer assistance to other states to meet their right to health obligations. COVID-19, especially until the rollout of vaccines, demonstrated the capacity of states to respond to crises when good health depended on health for all.
 
Admittedly, some did much better than others at ensuring the economic protection of low- and middle-income populations, as well as equitable access to care and vaccination. But the global commitment to “build back better” now rings hollow, and attempts to respond to climate change using the same existential-crisis framing are few and far between.
 
Overall, there has been a failure to respond to what should have been the most important lesson to come from the pandemic: good physical and mental health are fundamental to life and to our communities, and without good health, economies and societies cannot thrive. In terms of human rights, if the right to health is not realized, nor will any other economic, social, cultural, civil, or political rights be truly fulfilled.
 
While there are numerous examples in which the right to health framework has successfully advanced policies to respect, protect, and fulfill the rights of marginalized groups, we recognize that the right to health is rarely invoked to address the root causes of economic inequality.
 
Rather, the dominant interpretation of the right to health, accommodates—if not facilitates—the social atomization and market fetishism core to the neoliberal political project, which has increased economic inequality.
 
To address economic inequality and the right to health, states must change fiscal policies that remain focused on neoliberal goals such as those that promote unsustainable growth and ignore the plight of the majority and the planet.
 
If universal good health had been afforded prominence, the health workforce would not be in its current precarious state, facing a projected global shortage of about 10 million workers by 2030, spread unequally, with the worst shortages expected in the lowest-income countries with the most need.
 
To fulfill an equal right to health, states must invest in health workers and in health infrastructure, and stop the egregious gouging of the health dollar by the private sector, especially in the for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical sectors.
 
Yet with few exceptions, the role of fiscal management in contributing to increased economic inequality and unequal access to health care and the social determinants of health has not been examined by right to health scholars.
 
The papers in this special section address economic inequality and the right to health, examining health care systems and the social determinants of health in the context of neoliberalism and in light of the recent and current crises of gross economic inequality, austerity measures, climate change, and COVID-19.
 
Neoliberalism and the right to health
 
Three of the papers examine the impact of neoliberalism on the right to health, considering the political dynamics of the post-COVID-19 context, the United Nations treaty bodies’ consideration of private actors in health care systems, and the consequences of development finance institutions funding private for-profit health care with taxpayer funds from wealthy countries.
 
In the first paper, Ted Schrecker argues that post-COVID-19, we have reached a “tipping point” in terms of economic inequality, making it more difficult, if not impossible, to realize health as a human right.
 
He predicts, pessimistically, a gradual deterioration of tax-financed universal health care and greater health inequalities as the wealthy members of society are increasingly able to translate into policy their opposition to finance health care for those less well off. The post-COVID-19 era, he foresees, is likely to continue the “hegemony of neoliberal or market fundamentalist perspectives domestically and internationally” in continual detriment to the right to health.
 
Private actors form an important component of this neoliberal project, according to authors Rossella De Falco, Timothy Fish Hodgson, Matt McConnell, and A. Kayum Ahmed. In their paper, they survey statements from United Nations treaty bodies, the Special Rapporteurs on the right to health, and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights concerning the involvement of private actors and the right to health. Like Schrecker, they believe that the “commercialization of health care systems still does not appear to have reached its zenith.”
 
Nonetheless, they argue that several normative developments, including growing skepticism of the compatibility of private actors in health care with the right to health, present opportunities for treaty bodies to interpret the right to health to require inequality-reducing measures. In this respect, they suggest several ways for treaty bodies to increase their efforts to reduce commercialization and economic inequality toward realizing the right to health.
 
In the third paper, Anna Marriott, Anjela Taneja, and Linda Oduor-Noah examine whether a sample of European development finance institutions and the International Finance Corporation are meeting their obligations regarding the right to health. The authors find that more than 50% of these entities’ investments in health have gone to the private sector, which is not well regulated or held accountable for realizing the right to health. They conclude that this investment approach is placing significant barriers for many people to access quality, affordable health services and thereby limits the realization of the fundamental right to health for all.
 
Based on this analysis, the authors recommend that high-income governments and the World Bank not fund any future for-profit private health care projects through development finance institutions unless various steps are taken, including strengthening these institutions’ approach to human rights due diligence through greater transparency, nondiscrimination, monitoring, and accountability.
 
The right to health as a redistributive project
 
Four papers examine the redistributive potential of human rights, focusing on social protection, universal health care, the conception of equality in human rights law, and climate change.
 
First, for Joo-Young Lee, economic inequality is a key social determinant of health, and social protection is essential for ensuring an adequate standard of living while simultaneously reducing economic inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted “the need for a robust social protection system, including income protection, family and child support, and health care”; however, there remain large gaps globally.
 
In this context, Lee revisits international human rights law, maintaining that it offers a normative foundation for a transformative social protection system. More specifically, she looks to both the right to social security and the International Labour Organization’s Social Protection Floors in Recommendation No. 202 to provide “a firm normative basis for the requirement of comprehensive universal coverage for protection against social risks.”
 
Second, Anja Rudiger argues compellingly in her paper that advocates for the right to health should embrace universal health care as “a redistributive project” that can contribute to advancing not only the right to health but also serve as a mechanism to reduce economic inequality.
 
She contrasts the market-based health care system in the United States with a truly universal health care system, focusing on (1) who pays for it?, (2) who has ownership of it?, and (3) who governs it? While she recognizes that traditional human rights advocates may resist the ideas of redistribution, public ownership, and co-governance, she argues that greater economic equality through such measures must be at the heart of efforts to realize the right to health for all.
 
According to Michael Marcondes Smith, economic policies—such as austerity measures—that concentrate wealth and increase economic inequalities often have negative impacts on human rights. Yet austerity measures are justified on the basis of supporting growth and trickle-down economics, which would ostensibly eventually result in the realization of human rights.
 
Marcondes Smith maintains that the general assumption that human rights may be sidelined and postponed while economic inequality increases suggests a problematic conception of equality in human rights law. In his paper, he critically examines the way this assumption informs the exclusion of distributive considerations from the scope of equality within human rights law. He proposes a reinterpretation of equality in human rights that “may take on a distributive function in combating policies of wealth concentration such as austerity.”
 
Thalia Viveros-Uehara’s paper on climate change and economic inequality draws on the human rights framework “to chart a more transformative course toward a distributive, corrective, and procedural balance” that advances the socioeconomic conditions of marginalized groups.
 
Viveros-Uehara recommends that in addition to addressing climate mitigation (such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions), we must also address climate adaptation (such as building more resilient health care systems).
 
She provides an overview of actions by international organizations, domestic courts, civil society, and research communities to show that almost all their attention is focused on mitigation. She argues that instead we must focus greater attention on “the urgent provision of accessible, acceptable, quality, and resilient health care” for those most at risk of health impacts flowing from the climate crisis.
 
Intellectual property and inequality
 
Two papers in this special section reflect on the intellectual property regime as a mechanism that contributes to economic inequality. Thomas Pogge’s paper critiques the current intellectual property regime—the patent system governed globally by the World Trade Organization—referring to it as “a toxic regime for rewarding important pharmaceutical innovations, one that persistently harms and kills millions of people around the world.”
 
In particular, Pogge explains how this system increases economic inequality and indeed is supported by economic inequality. In response, he proposes a Health Impact Fund to complement the patent system, whereby inventors of important new medicines would be rewarded based on the extent to which their medicine has improved health. Rather than limiting medicines to those who can afford them and thereby allowing diseases to continue to spread among populations, the Health Impact Fund would encourage inventors to address diseases among the poor, as they would be compensated for doing so. Such a system for remuneration of research on medicines would greatly reduce economic and health inequalities and contribute to realizing the right to health for all.
 
Luciano Bottini Filho suggests the need for a more comprehensive approach to manage scarcity in health care. In his paper, he examines various areas underemployed as part of the state obligation to maximize resources—as required by article 2 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights—and identifies a range of legal determinants of scarcity that can be used to positively influence the availability and affordability of health technologies aside from intellectual property (patent) laws.
 
In particular, he recommends that states adopt complementary policies such as direct price control, price negotiation and contractual mechanisms, competition laws, and public-private partnerships. While scholars have written extensively about the impacts of patents on the right to health, Filho introduces new avenues to explore in law.
 
Reimagining the right to health
 
The papers in this special section have led us to conclude that under a neoliberal organization of the global economy, which privileges the maximization of private interests over the realization of rights and collective well-being, economic inequality will soar and the right to health for all will remain unrealized.
 
The World Health Organization has attempted to expand on the social determinants of health by including the commercial determinants of health. As it explains:
 
The social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, the systems put in place to deal with illness, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life … Commercial determinants of health are a key social determinant, and refer to the conditions, actions and omissions by commercial actors that affect health.
 
The Lancet’s 2023 series on the commercial determinants of health recognizes the damaging effects of neoliberalism on the realization of the right to health. Rethinking and regulating corporate practices could potentially move us closer to addressing the underlying structural flaws baked into the neoliberal world order. At the same time, the Lancet’s conception of the commercial determinants of health is limited to for-profit actors and does not address the harmful practices of other private entities operating within a market logic exactly as a commercial entity would, such as non-profit hospitals and health insurance companies in the United States and private foundations globally.
 
One emergent idea that we offer as a provocation is to consider reconstituting the right to health as a “decolonial option.” For Walter Mignolo, decolonial options derive from acts of “epistemic disobedience,” or delinking from Euro-American constructions of universal knowledge centered on capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
 
Furthermore, epistemic disobedience requires engaging with knowledge and ideas that have traditionally been marginalized by Western modernity, such as Indigenous knowledge systems.
 
Instead of merely defending people living in poverty through inadequate social protection floors, or reducing inequality inadequately through the Sustainable Development Goals, human rights must work toward dismantling the violence of the neoliberal architecture that reproduces poverty and inequality. The papers in this special section open various avenues to advance this cause.
 
By delinking from the principles of neoliberal ideology—such as self-interested individualism, wealth accumulation, and economic inequality—and linking with marginalized epistemologies and peoples, human rights can begin a process of regeneration.
 
The right to health continues to serve as a valuable framework for challenging the profit-centered approach to health. Its evolution in response to the commercial determinants of health should also be supported. But given that the right to health remains open to corporate capture, some fundamental shifts are urgently needed.
 
We argue that the right to health must be explicitly decolonial for the right to health to serve as a framework for global health equity. This shift toward decoloniality will contribute to dismantling the neoliberal logic that underpins the global health architecture.
 
* Gillian MacNaughton, JD, MPA, DPhil, is a co-founder of Social and Economic Rights Associates; senior fellow with the Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy at Northeastern University School of Law; and affiliated researcher with the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights at the University of Connecticut, United States.
 
A. Kayum Ahmed, PhD, is assistant professor, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health; visiting scientist, Harvard University FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, Boston, United States.
 
http://www.hhrjournal.org/2023/12/economic-inequality-and-the-right-to-health-on-neoliberalism-corporatization-and-coloniality/ http://www.hhrjournal.org/volume-25-issue-2-december-2023/ http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-war-on-health-in-gaza http://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000243 http://www.thelancet.com/commissions/health-and-human-rights


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