Human Rights Agreements: How Taking them Seriously Could Transform Population Health

Currently, monitoring and implementation of human rights agreements is inadequate.  New data availability, its broad global access through changing ICT, and global social networks could transform monitoring, transparency and accountability.  These same tools could make human rights instruments a powerful approach to markedly changing social determinants of health and health equity.  The session will examine in particular the relevance of the most widely signed human rights agreements to population health and agreements on social and economic rights including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, New tools will be shared which are now becoming publicly available. These will include new maps of progress in 193 countries globally on issues ranging from labor to education, discrimination, poverty, and the environment which can be used by NGOs, as well as policy makers.  Longitudinal and cross-sectional data sets which include legal rights and policies in all UN countries merged onto harmonized household survey data for over 90 countries which can be used for multilevel modeling by researchers will also be presented.