Tag Archives: health

Right On Podcast, Episode 1: When the coronavirus comes in the door, do human rights go out the window?

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In this first episode of Right On: Human Rights Activists Respond to COVID-19, we talk to three leading human rights experts: law professor Scott Burris (Temple University), Patrick Eba (UNAIDS country director, Central African Republic) and Yaqiu Wang (China researcher, Human Rights Watch) and ask them: What are the tradeoffs we should make between individual freedoms and the greater public good? What are tradeoffs we just cannot not accept? And what can we learn from over 30 years of fighting for human rights in the response to HIV and tuberculosis? Moderated by Meg Davis in Geneva.

 

Webinar: Human rights in the COVID-19 response

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Public Webinar Series on the Coronavirus

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As countries scramble to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is seeing a massive roll-out of lockdowns, quarantines, and military and police deployments unlike anything we have experienced before. What does this mean for human rights – especially for people who were already marginalised and struggling to survive? Will populist and authoritarian rulers use the crisis as an excuse to expand surveillance, shutting down criticism in ways that threaten privacy, autonomy and accountability? A panel of leading experts on human rights from China, Kenya, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS explore these questions, and how the UN and civil society are responding to them.

SPEAKERS

  • Allan Maleche, Founding Executive Director of Kenya Legal and Ethical Issues Network on HIV and AIDS
  • Shen Tingting, HIV/AIDS and Human Rights Advocate
  • Emily Christie, Senior Advisor on Human Rights and Law, UNAIDS
  • Rajat Khosla, Human Rights Advisor, Department of Reproductive Health Research, WHO
  • Moderated by Meg Davis, Special Advisor, Strategy and Partnerships, Global Health Centre, Graduate Institute, Geneva

UNAIDS human rights indicators: What counts?

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“Annie Lennox SING campaign, Vienna 2010 b” by Manfred Werner – Tsui – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Take a trip back to the fabulous summer of 2010, when thousands of activists marched at the International AIDS Conference, waved our beer steins in Stephansplatz to the sweet songs of Annie Lennox, and demanded Human Rights and HIV/AIDS, Now More Than Ever. That year, UNAIDS added ambitious human rights targets to its 2011-15 “Getting to Zero” strategy.

Now fast forward to 2015. The UNAIDS-Lancet Commission has once again called for ambitious human rights action to help bring an end to AIDS by 2030. As UNAIDS and The Global Fund craft new strategies for the next four years, it seems like a good time to ask – how are we doing?

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onwards, upwards, webwards

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Welcome! Until a few weeks ago, I was the senior human rights advisor at The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria. There it was my job to put new policies and procedures in place to protect and promote human rights in the context of the three diseases, and to support country dialogue and grant-making in up to 140 countries eligible for Global Fund support (sometimes, it felt like all of them at once).

I’m no longer in eight meetings a day, and freed of the obligation to represent a $3-billion-a-year institution, I’m feeling a little gleeful, a bit like the Catalonian guy in this picture. Some occasional thoughts on health, human rights, travel and other topics will find their way here.