Human rights in patient care: a special collection.

This piece introduces the special Public Health Reviews collection on human rights in patient care (HRPC). Work on HRPC dates back to 2007 and an Open Society Foundations initiative in collaboration with partners in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We found that for marginalized groups, health care settings often were places of coercion, punishment, and/or violence rather than of treatment or care.

The Neglect of Persons with Severe Brain Injury in the United States: An International Human Rights Analysis.

Brain injury contributes more to death and disability globally than any other traumatic incident. While the past decade has seen significant medical advances, laws and policies remain stumbling blocks to treatment and care. The quality of life of persons with severe brain injury often declines with unnecessary institutionalization and inadequate access to rehabilitation and assistive technologies.

Strategic Litigation to Advance Public Health.

The HIV movement has relied on strategic litigation as an important tool to develop and enforce legal protections critical to health. This experience contains lessons on the potential of strategic litigation to advance public health more generally. Beyond impacting laws and policies, strategic litigation can change practice, breathing life into existing legal rules never implemented.

Legal advocacy as a tool to advance Roma Health.

Roma in central Europe face many violations of their rights, including those that impede their access to high-quality health care. Legal frameworks have the potential to address these violations, whereas legal advocacy services offer a means for enforcement of rights. We undertook key informant interviews with Roma civil society organisations and selected knowledgeable individuals in Macedonia, Romania and Serbia to identify lessons from the development of these services.

Legal Support for Palliative Care Patients.

Context: Palliative care patients face legal issues that impact their quality of life. Legal support, embedded in holistic palliative care services, has developed globally over the last decade to address this.

Objectives: This article aims to trace the origins of legal support for palliative care patients, detail models of legal support, and describe achievements and challenges.

Palliative Care and Human Rights: A Decade of Evolution in Standards.

Context: Human rights standards to address palliative care have developed over the last decade.

Objectives: This article aims to examine key milestones in the evolution of human rights standards to address palliative care, relevant advocacy efforts, and areas for further growth.

Methods: The article provides an analysis of human rights standards in the context of palliative care through the lens of the right to health, freedom from torture and ill treatment, and the rights of older persons and children.

Assessing legal advocacy to advance Roma health in Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia.

Across Europe, Roma suffer extreme marginalisation, negatively impacting their health. Many cannot access healthcare at all. For others, the health system is a hostile place.

Human rights in patient care: a theoretical and practical framework.

The concept of "human rights in patient care" refers to the application of human rights principles to the context of patient care. It provides a principled alternative to the growing discourse of "patients' rights" that has evolved in response to widespread and severe human rights violations in health settings. Unlike "patients' rights," which is rooted in a consumer framework, this concept derives from inherent human dignity and neutrally applies universal, legally recognized human rights principles, protecting both patients and providers and admitting of limitations that can be justified by human rights norms.

Advancing human rights in patient care through higher education in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Background: In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, for society's most marginalized people, health systems are too often places of violations of basic rights, rather than of treatment and care. At the same time, health practitioners are largely unaware of how to incorporate human rights norms in their work. Additionally, they may face abuses themselves, such as unsafe working conditions and sanctions for providing evidence-based care.

Access to justice: evaluating law, health and human rights programmes in Kenya.

Introduction: In Kenya, human rights violations have a marked impact on the health of people living with HIV. Integrating legal literacy and legal services into healthcare appears to be an effective strategy to empower vulnerable groups and address underlying determinants of health.

Methods: We carried out an evaluation to collect evidence about the impact of legal empowerment programmes on health and human rights.

Lessons from Africa: combating the twin epidemics of domestic violence and HIV/AIDS.

Domestic violence and HIV/AIDS have proven a lethal combination, exacting a heavy toll on women's lives, particularly in Africa. In this article, partially based on a presentation made at the human rights networking zone at the conference, Tamar Ezer examines the interrelation between domestic violence and HIV/AIDS, provides an analysis of obligations under human rights law, and describes innovative programs that attempt to address the intersection of these twin epidemics. The author argues for holistic approaches that address the social, economic and legal dimensions of the problem.

Swaziland: widows fighting for their rights.

The AIDS epidemic in Swaziland--the world's most severe--has wrought a generation of widows facing deep discrimination and violence. But the enactment of a new constitution, and support for the legal empowerment of women, provide new hope, Tamar Ezer writes.

Comprehensive care: palliative care and legal services in South Africa.

A fundamental and neglected part of the global response to HIV and AIDS, palliative care is also a critical entry-point for legal services. As Tamar Ezer and Joan Marston write, providing legal services to patients in palliative care can both protect human rights and improve health outcomes.