International obligations through collective rights: moving from foreign health assistance to global health governance

It is clear that many developing state governments cannot realise the health of their peoples without international cooperation. Therefore, the current paper proposes an international legal framework for collective human rights that offer a basis for developing sustainable structures of global health governance. These structures are to be designed to facilitate coordination and cooperation across the international community.

The authors find that: 

• researchers have increasingly sought to categorise international obligations under human right to health.
• this approach can be applied as a foundational framework for reducing global health inequalities through foreign assistance.
• yet the inherent limitations of the individual human rights framework hinder the impact of a ‘right to health’ approach on the relevant global institutions.
• indeed, these limited rights have proven insufficient to create accountability for international obligations in global health policy.
• on contrary, they enable the deterioration of primary health care systems that lack the ability to address an expanding set of public health claims.

 The document concludes that researchers must look beyond the individual right to health to create collective international legal obligations matching with a public health-centered approach to primary health care. The authors deem that the language and obligations of collective rights can achieve the public health goals that have been incompletely realised under the umbrella of individual right to health.

Other conclusions are as follows: 

• through the development and implementation of collective health rights, states can address inter-connected determinants of health within and across countries.
• thus, they can obligate the international community to scale-up primary health care systems in the developing world and thereby reduce public health inequities through global health governance.
• through the complementary advancement of individual and collective health rights, states can create the optimum synergy of global efforts, and give meaning to human rights.