Global Health and Human Rights Law Database

The right to health and other health-related rights have been enshrined in a number of international treaties, regional instruments, and national constitutions and laws. This has given rise to a significant body of cases decided by national courts and international and regional human rights bodies that interpret the content and state obligations of the right to health and other health-related rights, based on relevant human rights treaties and other legal instruments.

However, despite growing use of international, regional and domestic litigation to enforce and interpret rights in health related-matters, there is no comprehensive collection and categorization of health and human rights judgments. In response, the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and the Lawyers Collective—working with over 100 partners globally, including NGOs, academics and private researchers—collaborated to bring together judgments, international and regional legal instruments, and national constitutions involving health and human rights in a single Global Health and Human Rights Database.

As practitioners and scholars analyze legal strategies, the database can provide a starting point for research and practice. Given the growth of this database, it is expected that such a resource may serve as a basis for analogous legal reasoning across states to serve as precedents for future judgments, for comparative legal analysis of similar health claims in different country contexts, and for empirical research to clarify the impact of health-related rights on health outcomes.

Although publicly available as of March 2013, the database continues to be under development and is expected to formally launch in Fall 2013. Once formally launched, the database will be part of the O’Neill Institute’s website, as well as our partner’s website.

For more information on the development of the Database, please refer to Bridging international law and rights-based litigation: Mapping health-related rights through the development of the Global Health and Human Rights Database, an article published in the Health and Human Rights Journal.