The World Health Organization was born as a normative agency: Seventy-five years of global health law under WHO governance.

The World Health Organization (WHO) was born as a normative agency and has looked to global health law to structure collective action to realize global health with justice. Framed by its constitutional authority to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health, WHO has long been seen as the central actor in the development and implementation of global health law. However, WHO has faced challenges in advancing law to prevent disease and promote health over the past 75 years, with global health law constrained by new health actors, shifting normative frameworks, and soft law diplomacy.

Strengthening Human Rights in Global Health Law: Lessons from the COVID-19 Response.

While human rights law has evolved to provide guidance to governments in realizing human rights in public health emergencies, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the foundations of human rights in global health governance. Public health responses to the pandemic have undermined international human rights obligations to realize (1) the rights to health and life, (2) human rights that underlie public health, and (3) international assistance and cooperation. As governments prepare for revisions of global health law, new opportunities are presented to harmonize global health law and human rights law, strengthening rights-based governance to respond to future threats.

The Universal Periodic Review: A Valuable New Procedure for the Right to Health?

The right to health has been cast in increasingly broad terms in international human rights law, not only as a right to health care but also as a right to an ever more broad range of underlying and social determinants of health. Utilizing an analytical framework grounded in this broad view of the right to health, this article presents the findings of an empirical review of the right to health in the recommendations issued to states during the first two cycles of the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review. The Universal Periodic Review, a peer-review mechanism, has come to occupy a prominent position in global human rights oversight, not least because all United Nations member states are regularly scrutinized under the procedure.

Human rights accountability for maternal death and failure to provide safe, legal abortion: the significance of two ground-breaking CEDAW decisions.

In 2011, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) issued two landmark decisions. In Alyne da Silva Pimentel v. Brazil, the first maternal death case decided by an international human rights body, it confirms that States have a human rights obligation to guarantee that all women, irrespective of their income or racial background, have access to timely, non-discriminatory, and appropriate maternal health services.