Aeyal Gross

The right to health at the public/private divide : a global comparative study

Introduction: marrying human rights and health care systems: contexts for a power to improve access and equity Colleen M. Flood and Aeyal Gross Part I. National Public Health Systems (Tax Financed): 1. Litigating a right to healthcare in New Zealand Joanna Manning 2. The right to health in Sweden Anna-Sara Lind 3. Litigating health rights in Canada: a white knight for equity? Colleen M. Flood 4. Promoting access and equity in health - assessing the National Health Service in England Chris Newdick Part II. Social Health Insurance Systems: 5. Colombias right to health litigation in a context of healthcare reform Everaldo Lamprea 6. Health rights in Israel between solidarity and neo-liberalism Aeyal Gross 7. Health care access in the Netherlands: the true story Andre den Exter 8. Addressing equity in health care at the public-private intersection: the role of health rights enforcement in Hungary Maria Eva Foldes 9. Lending a helping hand: the impact of constitutional interpretation on Taiwans national health insurance program, health equity and distributive justice Y. Y. Chen Part III. Mixed Private/Public Systems: 10. Health rights at the juncture between state and market: the Peoples Republic of China Christina S. Ho 11. The role of rights and litigation in assuring more equitable access to health care in South Africa Lisa Forman and Jerome Amir Singh 12. Provision of health care services and the right to health in Brazil: the long, winding and uncertain road to equality Mariana Prado 13. A vision of an emerging right to health care in the United States: expanding health care equity through legislative reform Allison Hoffman 14. The legal protection and enforcement of health rights in Nigeria Remigius Nwabueze 15. Litigating the right to health in Venezuela: a non-justiciable right (?) in the context of a deficient health care system Oscar A. Cabrera and Fanny Gomez 16. Right to health in India: addressing inequities through litigation Anand Grover, Maitreyi Misra and Lubhyathi Rangarajan Conclusion: context for the promise and peril of the right to health Colleen M. Flood and Aeyal Gross.

Is There a Human Right to Private Health Care

In recent years we have noticed an increase in the turn to rights analysis in litigation relating to access to health care. Examining litigation, we can notice a contradiction between on the one hand the ability of the right to health to reinforce privatization and commodification of health care, by rearticulating claims to private health care in terms of human rights, and on the other hand, its ability to reinforce and reinstate public values, especially that of equality, against the background of privatization and commodification. While many hope that rights discourse will do the latter, and secure that access to health care should occur on the basis of need as opposed to ability to pay, it has actually been used to attempt to advance arguments that will allow access to private or semiprivate health insurance in ways that may exacerbate inequality. These types of arguments won ground in the Canadian Supreme Court, but were rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court. In order to avoid this co-optation of right to health, a notion of rights that incorporates the principles of substantive equality is required. Otherwise, one of the unintended consequences of inserting rights analysis into public health care may be that it will reinforce rather than challenge privatization in a way that may increase inequalities.

Sex, Love, and Marriage: Questioning Gender and Sexuality Rights in International Law

The cover of Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002 shows a picture of two men photographed from the back, with their hands holding each others waists. They are walking towards a camera crew. Based on the way they are dressed, it seems that they have just been married. Both men are wearing white dress shirts and have similar hairstyles, with one wearing a black waistcoat over the white shirt and the other with black braces. This collection, based on the Oxford Amnesty Lectures series on gender and sexuality, thus apparently features on its cover the same-sex marriage of two men, ostensibly held in one of the few jurisdictions that have legalized such a union (perhaps the Netherlands, which was the first to do so, and was later followed by Belgium, Spain, Canada, Massachusetts (United States), and South Africa). And while we know that ‘love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage’, what has sex got to do with this? Would it not be more appropriate for a cover of a book entitled Sex Rights to feature two persons engaged in sex or having just engaged in sex rather than a marriage ceremony? Would it not be more appropriate to depict, on a cover of a book called Sex Rights , a picture of two men in a position that suggests they have just had sex, an act for which they could be persecuted and prosecuted in various jurisdictions? So why, then, does a book on Sex Rights feature same-sex marriage on its cover?

The Righting of the Law of Occupation

Two doctrinal developments were necessary preconditions for the application of international human rights law (IHRL) in occupied territories to become part of international law. The first development was the growing recognition of the extraterritorial application of human rights—the idea that states are also bound by international human rights norms in actions they perform outside their borders— and the second was the determination that IHRL may apply together with international humanitarian law (IHL). The application of human rights in occupied territories is the outcome, possibly the most important, of these two developments. Given that occupation is one of the broadest manifestations of state control exercised outside sovereign borders, and one traditionally conceived as being governed by IHL rather than by IHRL, and given the length and extent of the occupying powers’ control over foreign nationals, the development that I refer to as the ‘righting’ of the law of occupation may radically transform international law on the relationships between occupier and occupied. As this Article will show, such a transformation has been underway in recent years. Advocates for applying IHRL in occupied territories in addition to IHL suggest that doing so would advance the welfare of the occupied people as well as a legal culture of compliance. They point out that enforcement mechanisms, such as UN treaty bodies and human rights courts, that are lacking in IHL would constitute an advantage, potentially filling the enforcement gap. Some argue that ‘no conceptual difference’ prevails between these two bodies of law, at least as they stand today. Since both are designed to promote human dignity and physical integrity and to minimize human suffering, they maintain that these common goals could be advanced by this development. This Article, however, argues that the application of IHRL in occupied territories may in fact lead to a radical transformation in the law of occupation because of the conceptual differences that do exist between IHL and IHRL.

Globalization, Human Rights, and American Public Law Scholarship - A Comment on Robert Post

Robert Posts work in constitutional theory is engaging in an exceptional way: it always forces one to rethink and reconsider the basic tenets of the field. In his article The Challenge of Globalization to American Public Law Scholarship, Post discusses American public law and human rights scholarship in the age of globalization. In this comment, I will make a few remarks on some of the points raised in the article.