Global Health Discuss a recent security of human right event

Global Health

Discuss a recent security of human right event, either global or national and explain what the violation(s) were and what bothered you the most about it?

Solution

Human rights:

Rights that all people are entitled to simply because they are human beings and not citizens of a particular state. Human rights include civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights.

Human rights violations involve both the nonfulfillment of a human right and a certain causal responsibility of human agents for this non-fulfillment.

Non-fulfillment:

A particular human right of some particular person is unfulfilled when this person lacks secure access to the object of that human right. This object is whatever the human right is a right to: for example, freedom of movement, equal political participation, basic education, or freedom from assault. With regard to the human rights of the global poor, the most immediately relevant human right is the one already cited in Part I: the right to secure access to an adequate standard of living. But it is not the only one. Those who lack secure access to an adequate standard of living typically lack secure access to the objects of other human rights as well. For example, many people are compelled by poverty to enter employment relations in which they are subject to serious abuse by factory supervisors or domestic employers. Many women are exposed to assault and rape because they cannot afford to divorce their husband, cannot afford a secure dwelling, or must fetch water from distant locations. Others are sold into prostitution by their own relatives or fall prey to traffickers who abduct them or promise them a living wage abroad. Most poor people are vulnerable to humiliation, dispossession, or personal domination because they lack the means to defend their legal rights.

The right to adequate food, like any other human right, imposes three types or levels of obligations on States parties: the obligations to respect, to protect and to fulfill. In turn, the obligation to fulfill incorporates both an obligation to facilitate and an obligation to provide. The obligation to respect existing access to adequate food requires States parties not to take any measures that result in preventing such access. The obligation to protect requires measures by the State to ensure that enterprises or individuals do not deprive individuals of their access to adequate food. The obligation to fulfill (facilitate) means the State must pro-actively engage in activities intended to strengthen people‘s access to and utilization of resources and means to ensure their livelihood, including food security. Finally, whenever an individual or group is unable, for reasons beyond their control, to enjoy the right to adequate food by the means at their disposal, States have the obligation to fulfill (provide) that right directly. This obligation also applies for persons who are victims of natural or other disasters.

From Non-Fulfillment to Violation:

Human rights may give human agents four distinct kinds of duties: duties to respect human rights, duties to protect (secure access to the objects of) human rights, duties to provide (secure access to) the objects of human rights, and duties to facilitate human rights fulfillment. these four duties will focus on cases where a breach of the duty counts as a human rights violation. This sentence suggests that some breaches of humanrights-correlative duties are not human rights violations. That this is so is illustrated by cases of uninvolved bystanders who can protect or provide at reasonable cost. They have a duty to do so but are not human rights violators if they fail. Consider a rich Swede in 1830, who could have bought slaves and set them free or could have sent money or food to starving people in India. Many will say that he ought to have done this and had a duty to do it. But few will say that, by doing nothing of this sort, he violated the human rights of those he failed to rescue. The latter judgment is widely rejected in part for the unsound reason that the number of those who needed rescuing far exceeded his capacity for rescue, which makes it unclear whose human rights his failure violated. The compelling reason why the language of violation seems inappropriate here is that the Swede was not responsible for, nor implicated in, the relevant human rights being unfulfilled, he is in a position to help the starving and the enslaved, but he himself played no role in their starvation or enslavement. Not every case of a human right being unfulfilled is a case of this right being violated. An unfulfilled human right manifests a human rights violation only if there are one or more human agents who are bringing about the un-fulfillment of the human right in question even while they could and should have known that their conduct would have this result. The most straightforward human rights violations involve breaches of duties to respect, that is, duties not to take any measures that result in preventing a human being from having secure access to the object of a human right. As this negative formulation indicates, these are conceived as negative duties: duties that can be honored by remaining passive and can be breached only by taking action. So what actions should these duties forbid? They should forbid any action that is reasonably avoidable and foreseeably causes some human being to be prevented from enjoying secure access to the object of a human right. This formulation requires at least two clarifications. First, the expression reasonably avoidable may seem redundant: if the agent could and should foresee that the contemplated action would prevent a human being from having secure access to the object of a human right, then (one might think) the agent can and ought to avoid this effect. But there may be cases where refraining would allow the occurrence of massive harms that only the contemplated action can avert. And one might then formulate the duty so that it does not apply in such cases on the ground that the agent cannot reasonably avoid the relevant action. Second, the word causes should be read to include cases where the preventing is effected indirectly, as when a commander orders his soldiers to destroy a dam, thereby depriving peasants of the water they need to irrigate their crops.