Human rights and the challenges of science and technology: Commentary on Meier et al. "Translating the human right to water and sanitation into public policy reform" and Hall et al. "The human right to water: the importance of domestic and productive water rights".

The expansion of the corpus of international human rights to include the right to water and sanitation has implications both for the process of recognizing human rights and for future developments in the relationships between technology, engineering and human rights. Concerns with threats to human rights resulting from developments in science and technology were expressed in the early days of the United Nations (UN), along with the recognition of the ambitious human right of everyone "to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications." This comment explores the hypothesis that the emerging concepts most likely to follow recognition of the human right to water primarily involve issues of science and technology, such as access to medicines or clean and healthy environment.

Accountability for the health consequences of human rights violations: methodological issues in determining compensation.

The issue of compensation is an under-studied dimension of a rights-based approach to health. The emerging normative framework that allows for compensation of human rights abuses lacks a consistent and transparent methodology for valuing health losses. While methods for assigning monetary values to decreases in health have evolved through health economics, these techniques have developed outside of a human rights framework and do not adequately account for such concerns as fairness and nondiscrimination.