Research

Global Health and Rights Project (GHRP)

Overview

Launched in 2019, the Petrie-Flom Center’s work on global health justice seeks to advance theorization of a “right to health” under international and applicable domestic law as well as an understanding of the challenges to using human rights to advance health justice that are rooted in national and global political economies. It includes a Senior Fellowship and affiliated researchers, and convenes public symposia and events as well as policy-relevant research projects done in collaboration with partners at Harvard and around the globe.

GHRP maintains a particular focus on Latin America. Although an extremely diverse region, Latin American countries share high degrees of socio-economic inequality that is refracted in disparities in health status and access to care, and face a series of common challenges. The pandemic highlighted the cumulative effects of transnational determinants of health, including intellectual property regulation, sovereign debt, and multiple waves of austerity on institutional capacity and political economies. As also laid bare during the pandemic, in many countries, political polarization as well as regulatory dysfunction impair the ability to collectively arrive at democratically legitimate decisions regarding health and social policy. Further, the region is unique in how many countries have recognized the right to health autonomously in their constitution or by incorporation through international treaties, or both, and in turn permit individual protection writ actions (amparos, tutelas) to obtain health–related entitlements from courts with relative ease. 

The Project engages in policy and research projects that identify and critically analyze the use of distinct approaches for advancing systemic fairness, including financing, priority-setting, and judicial roles in national health systems, as well as connections between population health and democratic legitimacy more broadly. It also seeks to elevate the voices and perspectives of Latin American scholars and practitioners regarding global health issues arising out of the pandemic and otherwise.

Senior Fellow

Alicia Yamin

Alicia Ely Yamin

Alicia Ely Yamin, JD MPH is the Project’s inaugural Senior Fellow in Global Health and Rights, and leads GHRP’s collaborations. 

Yamin serves as Senior Advisor on Human Rights at Partners in Health, which enables students to engage with real-world advocacy issues of global health justice.

Additionally, Yamin actively collaborates on GHRP projects with: (1) the Bergen Centre on Ethics and Priority Setting in relation to ethical and legal considerations for priority-setting in health systems; and (2) the Centre on Law and Social Transformation in relation to gender, sexuality and the law.

In 2016, the UN Secretary General appointed Yamin as one of ten international global health experts to the Independent Accountability Panel for the Global Strategy on Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Yamin has contributed to the work of human rights treaty-monitoring bodies, UN Special Procedures, and reports prepared for Human Rights Council, as well as to expert groups at the WHO. She currently serves on the WHO’s Technical Advisory Group on Health Technology Assessments for the SDGs, as well as the Lancet Commission on Arctic Health.

Yamin was named by the Colombian Constitutional Court as an Independent Expert on the implementation of   T 760/08, a major structural judgment that led to significant health care reform. She was also the only non-Kenyan appointed to the oversight committee for health matters of the Constitutional Implementation Commission in relation to the 2010 Kenyan Constitution. Yamin has provided expert testimony in multiple national and supra-national cases related to health rights.

Yamin has published over a hundred scholarly articles in both law journals and peer-reviewed public health journals, in English and Spanish. Her latest book is When Misfortune becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality (Stanford University Press, 2020).

see Affiliated Researchers

Scholarship

Publications & Symposia
Events