Research

Global Health and Rights Project (GHRP)

Overview

Launched in 2019, the Petrie-Flom Center addresses some of the most pressing issues at the intersection of law, international development and global health. With a focus on Latin America, GHRP 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. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, GHRP has also increasingly focused on global governance for health, which has recently been upended by the Trump administration. 

GHRP includes a Senior Fellowship and affiliated researchers, as well as Visiting Researchers who develop their own research in conjunction with GHRP’s Project Lead. GHRP convenes public symposia and events as well as conducting policy-relevant research projects, which are virtually always inter-disciplinary and are carried out in collaboration with partners at Harvard and around the globe.

As part of its commitment to advancing equity in global health, the Global Health and Rights Project approaches health as a matter shaped by structural inequalities, including gendered divisions of labor and economic marginalization. From a feminist human rights perspective, barriers to healthcare are often rooted in broader systems of social reproduction, financial precarity, and unequal responsibility for sustaining households and communities. These dynamics directly affect autonomy, access to services, and the effective enjoyment of fundamental rights. By incorporating feminist legal analysis into its work, the Project highlights how global health governance, economic policy, and human rights law intersect, and why gender justice is essential to achieving meaningful health equity worldwide.

Background

Why the focus on Latin America? Although an extremely diverse region, Latin American countries share high degrees of social inequality along axes of class, race, ethnicity and gender, which is refracted in disparities in health status and access to care. Latin American countries share some common institutional challenges, including highly fragmented health systems and regulatory gaps and failures. At the same time, 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 judicial enforcement of health-related rights. In recent years feminists and other groups have made enormous advances in respect of sexual and reproductive health and rights, including access to abortion. Likewise, the region has some of the most innovative jurisprudence and standards on climate and health. 

The Project engages in policy and research projects that identify and critically analyze the use of distinct approaches for advancing and protecting population health, as well as connections between population health and democratic legitimacy more broadly. Through its focus as well as its design, GHRP seeks to elevate the voices and perspectives of Latin American scholars and practitioners regarding the role of law in national, regional and global health issues.

In addition to its focus on Latin America, in the last few years, GHRP has developed a program of work on global governance for health, which came under scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic and has further suffered in the current administration. The architecture of global health – institutions, norms, practices – has been increasingly criticized as being marked by concentration of power, driven by donor interests and knowledge hierarchies, and, despite decades of anti-colonial struggles for change, trapped in colonialist dynamics. To the extent that there is a system of global health governance, it is one that fails to deliver equity at critical moments, as vividly demonstrated by the dysfunctions of vaccine production and distribution during the Covid-19 pandemic. The changes to the global order in which we have been operating for years calls for creative and evidence-based innovations driven by rigorous multi-disciplinary research. 

People

Alicia Yamin

Alicia Ely Yamin

Senior Fellow and Project Lead

Thalia Viveros Uehara

Visiting Scholar; Salata-Burke Fellow 

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Alicia Ely Yamin, JD, MPH, PhD, is a Lecturer on Law and the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and Senior Adviser on Human Rights and Health Policy at the global health justice organization, Partners In Health.

Known globally for her trans-disciplinary work in relation to economic and social rights, reproductive justice, the right to health, and the intersections between development paradigms and human rights, Yamin’s career has bridged academia and activism. She has lived in Latin America and East Africa for much of her professional life and worked with local advocacy organizations, including co-founding a program on health and human rights in the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (Lima, Peru; 1999).

Yamin was appointed by the UN Secretary General as one of ten international experts to the Independent Accountability Panel for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health in the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2021). She was the chief consultant to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and drafter of the Technical guidance on the application of a human-rights based approach to the implementation of policies and programmes to reduce preventable maternal morbidity and mortality, the first guidance on a ‘human rights-based approach to health’ to be adopted by the UN Human Rights Council. Yamin has served on numerous other UN, WHO and other global expert committees. She currently serves on the Lancet Commissions on Global Governance and Health 2.0 and on Arctic and Northern Health, as well as the WHO Global Advisory Group on Legislating Maternal Perinatal Death Surveillance.

Yamin has a long track record in on-the-ground program implementation as well as policy-oriented public health research. She has been the principal investigator on multi-methods, multi-country studies, participated in setting up a maternal health program in Peru, and has evaluated the alignment of health programs with human rights standards and principles on behalf of both national governments and international institutions.

As a specialist in international and comparative law relating to health and sexual and reproductive rights issues, Yamin regularly submits Amicus Curiae briefs and provides expert testimony to tribunals around the globe, including the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 2011, 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 system reform In Colombia. 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.

From 2009-2015, Yamin served as Chair of the Board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights (Vice-Chair, 2001-08), and continues to serve on the Advisory Council. She is a current and founding member of the Global Health Law Consortium, as well as Senior Associated Researcher and Advisory Board Member of the Centre on Law and Social Transformation. Yamin also sits on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bergen Centre on Ethics and Priority Setting (B-CEPS), as well as on the international advisory boards of the RedAAS (Argentine Safe Abortion Access Network) and the Proyecto Mirar (monitoring implementation of Law 27.610, which legalized abortion in Argentina).

Yamin holds Juris Doctor and Master’s in Public Health degrees from Harvard University, and a Doctorate in Law from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. She has edited and authored over a dozen books and UN reports, as well as close to 200 articles in law, policy and public health/medical journals, in both English and Spanish. Her work has also been translated into French, Korean, Portuguese, and Estonian. A revised and substantially expanded second edition of her most recent monograph, When Misfortune becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023. A Spanish edition is forthcoming from the Editorial UniAndes in 2026.

see Affiliated Researchers

The Project

While this list is not exhaustive, GHRP research addresses the following key areas:

  1. Judicialization of health- and climate-related rights
  2. Health and social justice, with a focus on the interactions between law and political economy at national and international levels
  3. Challenges in Global Governance for Health 
  4. Global Health Law

The GHRP team addresses these issues by publishing multi-disciplinary academic research; hosting academic events and roundtables; educating courts, litigators, legislators, government agencies, and the public; and training the next generation of thought leaders in this emerging field. 

In 2024, GHRP was selected by the Harvard Global Health Institute to lead an Inter-faculty scholarly working group (SWG) on “Advancing Global Health Justice.” That SWG was renewed for a second year at the end of 2025. Other members of the Scholarly working Group included: Professors Mary Bassett (TH Chan), Jesse Bump (TH Chan), Joia Mukherjee (HMS), and Eugene Richardson (HMS). That SWG produced publications and connections to communities of practice. For example, a co-authored working paper that presents a conceptual framework for understanding power and accountability in global health governance is the Global health governance and the challenge of holding power to account: UNU-IIGH working paper.

As part of the work of the SWG, in 2024, Yamin applied for and received a grant from the Brocher Foundation to hold an international workshop on the role of the pharmaceutical industry in mental health policy and care, with a focus on middle-income countries. The “psychiatrization” of mental health is an under-studied aspect of the impacts of pharmaceutical industry’s influence over global health, which tends to focus almost exclusively on control of supply of medicines, as opposed to their role in creating demand as well. This event led to a subsequent special issue of Harvard Health and Human Rights in December 2025. The SWG also conducted an assessment of Harvard University’s offering on global health governance and financing, and the final report was presented to the HGHI steering Committee and then used in deliberations over the redesign of the GHHP undergraduate concentration.

In 2025 GHRP, in collaboration with the Graduate School of International Affairs at the New School, undertook a multidisciplinary project on a “New Multilateralism for Global Health Equity,” which will continue into 2026. This research project is an extension and deepening of thinking that we began at a meeting convened by the GHRP in April 2025. At that meeting, seventeen scholars and advocates from different disciplines and geographic regions explored alternative approaches to multilateralism that would address the structural inequities embedded in global health architecture while responding to the new political and economic realities. In no domain is the need to reimagine multilateralism more apparent than in global health, where the U.S. retreat has upended key institutions, norms, and financing.

Dr. Yamin speaking at A New Multilateralism for Global Health Equity, November 7, 2025

In order to seize the opportunity to remake a system that is more democratic and meaningfully prioritizes equity, this project brings together thoughtful and engaged scholarship from multiple disciplines. We need to test and challenge orthodoxies in our different disciplines and approaches, and deliberate collectively around concrete proposals for the future of multilateralism in global health. The April 2025 meeting produced a collective document published in Global Policy (GP) Opinion, which outlined 10 principles that should be at the core of a new architecture in global health, and the likely political strategies to put the reimagined multilateral system, or systems, in place. This project develops this system in greater detail and will produce a Special Issue of Global Perspectives, as well as webinars and podcasts. It will also complement and inform work being done by Senior Fellow and GHRP director, Alicia Yamin, on the Lancet Commission on Global Governance for Health 2.0.

Scholarship

Publications
Commentary
Digital Symposia
Multimedia Materials
Events