Health and Human Rights’ Past: Patinating Law’s Contribution

This article argues that to be able to look forward, lawyers within the health and human rights movement need to do more looking back. It is prompted by a simple question: do we have a history of health and human rights law and lawyering? Finding nothing that qualifies, the article asks how we might fill that gap. Focusing on international human rights law, it prescribes histories of health and human rights law “favorites,” notably the international human right to health and human rights-based approaches to health. It also prescribes histories of neglect: histories exploring the low levels of attention to certain issues, such as the right to science, that seem directly relevant to health and human rights. The article emphasizes that neither of these history projects should be a search for origins or an opportunity to pitch linear “onwards and upwards” accounts of health and human rights law. The prescription is for histories that are open to the ebb and flow of particular international human rights law norms and approaches as they have come into being and crisscrossed the United Nations and beyond.