United Nations
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The United Nations and the World Health Organization:
‘The Right to Health’
At present many governments do not uphold the UN and WHO Right to Health.
This requires following EMF exposure guidelines such as Bioinitiative 2012, EUROPAEM 2016 and IGNIR 2018, and not ICNIRP’s based on Schwan’s mistake of 1953 protecting against only heating and only for 6 minutes.
Some points from: UN and WHO Factsheet 31 (2008):
- The right to health is an inclusive right.
It includes a wide range of factors that can help us lead a healthy life.
These the “underlying determinants of health” include:
Healthy working and environmental conditions - The right to health contains freedoms.
These freedoms include:
the right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment, such as medical experiments and research or forced sterilization, and to be free from torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. - The right to health contains entitlements.
These entitlements include:
The right to a system of health protection providing equality of opportunity for everyone to enjoy the highest attainable level of health;
Participation of the population in health-related decision-making at the national and community levels. - No State can justify a failure to respect its obligations because of a lack of resources.
- Human rights are interdependent, indivisible and interrelated.
This means that violating the right to health may often impair the enjoyment of other human rights, such as the rights to education or work, and vice versa. - Non-discrimination and equality are fundamental human rights principles and critical components of the right to health.
Non-discrimination and equality further imply that States must recognize and provide for the differences and specific needs of groups that generally face particular health challenges, such as higher mortality rates or vulnerability to specific diseases. - Positive measures of protection are particularly necessary when certain groups of persons have continuously been discriminated against in the practice of States parties or by private actors.
- The newly adopted Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires States to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by persons with disabilities, including their right to health, and to promote respect for their inherent dignity (art. 1)
Importantly, States must require health professionals to provide care of the same quality to persons with disabilities as to others, including on the basis of free and informed consent. - The WHO Constitution affirms that the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental human right (preamble).
- Accountability compels a State to explain what it is doing and why and how it is moving, as expeditiously and effectively as possible, towards the realization of the right to health for all.
At a minimum, all accountability mechanisms must be accessible, transparent and effective. - Some of the most crucial measures related to domestic enforcement are the provision of judicial mechanisms for rights considered justiciable in accordance with the national legal system.
Such mechanisms should provide remedies to individuals if their right to health is violated.