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and legal concerns shared across diverse cultures. Moreover, there is every indication
that whatever their origins, human rights are becoming rooted in diverse jurisdictions
globally, some of which are producing alternative rights cultures more attentive to
structural inequalities, basic socioeconomic needs, and collective duties. this is
most apparent in the emergence from South africa of a communitarian conception
of human rights based on african notions of
ubuntu
(Forman 2008), and a strong
Latin American conception of rights that has 'synthesized the individualistic with
the social and economic dimensions of human dignity' (Carrozza 2003, 312).
Academic debates over the limited efficacy of international human rights law
must also contend with the growing legal enforcement of the right to health. South
africa is at the forefront of these changes, with a post-apartheid constitutional
healthcare right, which social actors have effectively enforced against governments
replicated in jurisdictions across the globe: in thailand in 2002, nongovernmental
organisations (nGos) used constitutional and international human rights to health
and life to challenge a bristol Myers-Squibb patent on an antiretroviral drug. the
court partially invalidated this patent to permit domestic production and distribution
of a generic version of this medicine, holding that 'medicine is essential for human
life' and that 'the treatment of life and health transcends the importance of any other
have enforced human rights in international, regional, and national laws to require
government provision of AIDS medicines (Hogerzeil
et al. 2006). the consistent
variables in countries where there was successful litigation were ratification of
the covenant on economic, Social, and cultural rights and the entrenchment of
constitutional rights to health (306). In this regard it is notable that 153 countries (two
thirds of the global total) are parties to the covenant, and that 192 countries (every
country in the world except the U.S. and Somalia) are parties to the convention
on the rights of the child, which also includes a right to health (UnHcHr 2006).
there is similarly high domestic protection of this right, with almost two thirds of
all national constitutions now including health and health-related rights (Kinney and
clark 2004, 287). the right to health is therefore increasingly legally binding in
diverse jurisdictions and being effectively deployed to ensure access to health care
and medicines.
certainly human rights do not hold this legal force in all countries. Yet while
human rights may hold little or no legal status in non-democratic or autocratic
regimes such as china and Myanmar, it is equally apparent that the power of
human rights is not determined solely by legal factors. In the 60 years of their
existence as international law, human rights have assumed a considerable moral and
normative force, becoming seen as the 'dominant moral vocabulary of our time'
(Gready 2003, 749) and the only political-moral idea that has received universal
acceptance (Henkin 1990, xvii). while this provides no assurance of governmental
compliance with human rights, human rights are increasingly claimed as a language
of social justice by social movements around the world. Indeed, emerging evidence
suggests that the use of human rights strategies in combination with social action
