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Health professionals and human rights activists can sometimes see the world in very different ways. I was recently invited to talk at a training workshop on health and human rights in southern Asia run by the International Federation of Health and Human Rights Organisations (IFHHRO). The theme of the five-day workshop was "monitoring the right to health". It was hosted by a national medical association with a significant track record in promoting an understanding of the links between human rights and health. There are not many medical associations in the world that have made such a commitment, and it struck me as particularly impressive that it was an association from a middle-income country, where resources can be scarce.
There were 40 or so people at the workshop, divided more or less equally between doctors, other health professionals, medical students and, for want of a more nuanced description, human rights activists: men and women employed directly by civil society groups working in the field of health and human rights. As is often the case with meetings of this kind, I was impressed by the passion and commitment of the delegates. Here were dedicated women and men, often working in difficult conditions, trying to identify concrete ways to improve the well-being of vulnerable human beings. I was therefore both puzzled and upset to see, as the workshop progressed, animosity developing between the medical students and the human rights workers, particularly among the younger members of each group. At one point, I was told that some of the medical students were considering leaving, as they were feeling personally attacked for participating in, or not speaking out about, human rights violations.
In this article, I look at the nature of the disagreement that emerged at the conference. I situate it first of all in relation to a strong shared commitment to the "right of everyone to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health"-often shortened to "the right to health" as it appears in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). 1 I then look at some of the tensions that emerged between the participants and identify some of the causes of apparent disagreement. I look at the relevance of human rights to health professionals...