Title: 'Do Human Rights Work? A Case Study of the Right to Health in Brazil'

Abstract: The idea of a human right to health goes back at least to the constitution of the World Health Organisation of 1946 and is now firmly established both in international and domestic laws. 166 countries have ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, whose article 12 recognises a “right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health”. More than two thirds of the constitutions of all nations have also recognised the right to health in some form or another.

Yet, the reality of health conditions around the world, despite significant improvements in the past few decades, remains disheartening. According to the latest statistics included in the World Health Report of 2017, 830 women still die everyday of complications during pregnancy or childbirth,155 million children under the age of five were stunted in 2016. Of the 36.7 million people living with HIV, less than half (18.2 million) were on antiretroviral therapy.

Are we to conclude that the human right to health has been of no, or very little significance? Is the right to health just another “phantom right” that is “systematically marginalized” alongside other social and economic rights?

I address these questions through a more detailed and focused analysis than it is often seen in the literature. In my view, although it may be possible to draw some interesting insights about the effectiveness of human rights law in general, these insights will be necessarily limited due to inevitable and crucial variations related to specific rights and local contexts.

I focus therefore on the experience of 30 years of the right to health in Brazil in an attempt to improve our understanding of the complex role played by human rights in our messy real world.