Katarina Tomasevski – författare

This volume maps out the response of states to human rights violations. It covers the period 1946-1999 and offers a complete and unmatched record for this period. Its starting point is that such responses are not established and accepted state practice. Traditional, if unwritten, norms of states' behaviour developed through centuries of silence and inaction; the prevalent reaction to human rights violations by another state remains the absence of any response. Furthermore, this book probes into evidence of active and passive complicity by reviewing aid to countries in which violations have been taking place and diplomatic initiatives undertaken to shield violators from public opprobrium. Since international law is generated through state practice, the book highlights the ongoing tussle between the pre-1946 heritage of silence and inaction and the 1946-1999 haphazard pattern of responses to violations.

This publication is the second volume of Thematic Human Rights Guides published under the auspices of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. The aim of the Guides, as the title implies, is to facilitate the use of international human rights standards by their systematic presentation. Rather than reproducing full texts of various instruments, substantive standards are grouped according to subject-matter in order to enable users to quickly and easily locate the topic they may be looking for. A detailed index, with references to the many international instruments which address the same issue, reinforces this thematic approach. The choice of human rights and health for the second volume in this series highlights the aim of the Guides: to map out the entire range of human rights and fundamental freedoms as they relate to a specific topic. The sheer size of this volume illustrates the number and variety of human rights standards relevant for health. Many of these standards have been generated by organizations dealing with health rather than human rights, and quite a few are found under medical ethics rather than human rights. Subsuming medical ethics under international human rights law is a novel development, pioneered by the Council of Europe. Elsewhere, the two fields remain separate and the publication of this Guide is intended to overcome this separation. Documents have been included which provide an understanding of human rights within the health profession (such as guidance to medical doctors with regard to abortion adopted by the International Medical Association) and those human rights safeguards that have been elaborated to prevent abuses by health professionals (such as those concerning mental health). All of these standards provide a substantive background for inter-professional dialogue on the evolving understanding of human rights. A Thematic Guide to Documents on Health and Human Rights reflects the full range of issues encompassed by human rights and health. Besides the right to health, a wide range of rights and freedoms can be - and is - affected by the health sector. Priority has been accorded to the crucial human rights safeguards, namely those specifying protection against undue limitations or restrictions upon human rights. Much as with any other human rights topic, those safeguards are best developed for categories that are most vulnerable to denials and violations of their rights. Detainees, prisoners, victims of armed conflicts, children and the mentally ill thus figure prominently.