Abstract
Our interest in a human rights and health discourse emerges from our efforts as social scientists to bring a meaningful social justice perspective to the realm of public health. In Canada, as in many countries, “health” is still firmly within the domain of the biomedical and the clinical. While considerable effort has been made to include more social, economic, and cultural perspectives, efforts to frame these issues as political phenomena have tended to be polarized into either a rich body of theoretical literature or case studies of interventions which have in varying degrees incorporated a social justice approach. What is still missing is a framework of discourse that allows various concepts of social justice to inform policy, intervention strategies, evaluation and evidence-based measures of effectiveness. This commentary examines the human rights discourse as conceptual space from which to build this framework.
Fr: Social justice, human rights, public health
Réumé
L’intérêt que suscite le discours sur les droits humains et la santé chez les spécialistes des sciences sociales découle de nos efforts pour communiquer concrètement une perspective de justice sociale dans le domaine de la santé publique. Au Canada comme dans de nombreux pays, «la santé» est encore étroitement associée au domaine biomédical et clinique. Il y a eu des efforts considérables pour aborder la santé selon une perspective sociale, économique et culturelle, mais les tentatives pour voir dans la santé un phénomène politique ont tendance à se diviser en deux camps: d’une part, la somme considérable d’écrits théoriques, et de l’autre, les études de cas axées sur des mesures d’intervention incorporant à des degrés divers une approche de justice sociale. Il manque encore un cadre qui permettrait aux diverses notions du discours sur la justice sociale d’enrichir les politiques, les stratégies d’intervention, l’évaluation et les mesures de l’efficacité fondées sur les résultats. Dans la présente étude, nous examinons le discours sur les droits humains en tant qu’espace notionnel à partir duquel élaborer un tel cadre.
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