Publications by Author: Marks%2C%20Stephen

Advancing the Human Right to Health offers a prospective on the global response to one of the greatest moral, legal, and public health challenges of the 21st century - achieving the human right to health as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and other legal instruments.

Featuring writings by global thought-leaders in the world of health human rights, the book brings clarity to many of the complex clinical, ethical, economic, legal, and socio-cultural questions raised by injury, disease, and deeper determinants of health, such as poverty. Much more than a primer on the right to health, this book features an examination of profound inequalities in health, which have resulted in millions of people condemned to unnecessary suffering and hastened deaths. In so doing, it provides a thoughtful account of the right to health's parameters, strategies on ways in which to achieve it, and discussion of why it is so essential in a 21st century context.

Country-specific case studies provide context for analysing the right to health and assessing whether, and to what extent, this right has influenced critical decision-making that makes a difference in people's lives. Thematic chapters also look at the specific challenges involved in translating the right to health into action.

Advancing the Human Right to Health highlights the urgency to build upon the progress made in securing the right to health for all, offering a timely reminder that all stakeholders must redouble their efforts to advance the human right to health.

Health and Human Rights: Basic International Documents has been updated and expanded from the first two editions to provide the practitioner, scholar, and advocate with access to the most basic instruments of international law and policy that express the values of human rights for advancing health. The topics covered include professional ethics; research and experimentation; bioethics and biotechnology; the right to health; the right to life; freedom from torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide; the right to an adequate standard of living; women and reproductive health; children; persons with disabilities; the rights of other vulnerable groups; infectious diseases; business, trade, and intellectual property; non-communicable diseases; the right to a clean environment; and sustainable development. This book will be an indispensable reference for everyone working at the intersection of health and human rights.

The relationship between the processes of economic development and international human rights standards has been one of parallel and rarely intersecting tracks of international action. In the last decade of the 20th century, development thinking shifted from a growth-oriented model to the concept of human development as a process of enhancing human capabilities, and the intrinsic links between development and human rights began to be more readily acknowledged. Specifically, it has been proposed that if strategies of development and policies to implement human rights are united, they reinforce one another in processes of synergy and improvement of the human condition. Such is the premise of the Declaration on the Right to Development, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1986.

This book explores the meaning and practical implications of the right to development and the related term of human rights-based approaches to development and questions what these conceptions may add to our understanding and thinking about human and global development. Opening with an essay by Nobel Laureate in Economic Science Amartya Sen on human rights and development, the book contains a score of chapters on the conceptual underpinnings of development as a human right, the national dimensions of this right, and the role of international institutions. The authors reflect the disciplines of philosophy, economics, international law, and international relations.

It is a commonplace to recall that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) integrated civil and political rights (CPR) with economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR), and that the two International Covenants separated them.

Reflecting Cold War divisions, stress on one or the other of these two traditional categories tended to reveal preferences for neoliberal or social democratic understandings of human rights, when it was not more blatantly reflective of competition between the NATO and Warsaw Pact (plus "Non-Aligned") countries, a sort of North–West vs. East–South ideological split. This article explores how the separation of categories of rights has lost its pertinence in the first decade of the 21st century. My purpose is to show how the separation into two categories is perhaps a convenient taxonomy for some, but subject to serious challenge from the perspectives of political history, the theory of rights, and contemporary policy.

It is a commonplace to recall that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) integrated civil and political rights (CPR) with economic, social, and cultural rights (ESCR), and that the two International Covenants separated them.

Reflecting Cold War divisions, stress on one or the other of these two traditional categories tended to reveal preferences for neo-liberal or social democratic understandings of human rights, when it was not more blatantly reflective of competition between the NATO and Warsaw Pact (plus "Non-Aligned") countries, a sort of North–West vs. East–South ideological split. This article explores how the separation of categories of rights has lost its pertinence in the first decade of the 21st century. My purpose is to show how the separation into two categories is perhaps a convenient taxonomy for some, but subject to serious challenge from the perspectives of political history, the theory of rights, and contemporary policy.

This publication reviews one strategy that addresses both a broader and a narrower dimension of urban poverty. The Human Rights Cities Program is not directed toward securing legal title as a means of protecting the urban poor from market eviction and gentrification or to catalyze investment in low-income housing. It is rather a broader strategy of empowering inhabitants of communities to find collectively the ways and means of ensuring respect for their human rights, including the right to adequate housing, component elements of which are security of tenure, access to basic urban services, transport and mobility, financial services and credit, women’s empowerment, urban citizenship, income and livelihoods. It is thus a broader strategy than securing legal tenure.

This collection of papers deals with the legal issues involved in considering an international convention on the right to development. It is the outcome of a meeting jointly convened by the Program on Human Rights in Development of the Harvard School of Public Health and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Geneva Office in an effort to provide clarity regarding a highly charged issue on the human rights agenda of the international system. The Expert Meeting on legal perspectives involved in implementing the right to development was held at the Chateau de Bossey, Geneva, Switzerland, on January 4–6, 2008, and was attended by 24 experts in their personal capacity.

While positions of governments are entrenched and debates in the diplomatic setting of the General Assembly or the Human Rights Council are often acrimonious, none of the contributions to this study is premised on any political preference for or against the elaboration of a convention. The aim of each author was to provide clarity regarding the legal problems to be addressed.