October 2, 2017, 5-7 PM
Hauser Hall, Room 104
Harvard Law School, 1575 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Presentation: “Democracy, Health Systems and the Right to Health: Narratives of Charity, Markets and Citizenship”
This paper is not available for download. To request a copy in preparation for the workshop, please contact Jennifer Minnich at jminnich@law.harvard.edu.
Alicia Yamin is the Program Director of the Health and Human Rights Initiative. Prior to joining the O’Neill Institute, Alicia was a Lecturer on Law and Global Health at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, and the Director of the JD /MPH Program. Alicia was also the Policy Director at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard, a Global Fellow at the Centre for Law and octal transformation in Norway, and was selected as the 2015-16 Marsha Lilien Gladstein Visiting Professor of Human Rights, University of Connecticut. Trained in both law and public health at Harvard, Yamin’s 20-year career at the intersection of health and human rights has bridged academia and activism. From 2007 to 2011, Yamin held the prestigious Joseph H. Flom Fellowship on Global Health and Human Rights at Harvard Law School. Prior to that, she served as Director of Research and Investigations at Physicians for Human Rights, where she oversaw all of the organization’s field investigations, and was on the faculty of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. Yamin was a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Economic and Social Rights for 15 years and the Chair from 2009-2014.
Yamin currently serves as a Panelist on the Secretary-General’s Independent Accountability Panel for the Global Strategy for Women’s Children’s and Adolescents’ Health and as a Commissioner on the Lancet – O’Neill Institute Commission on Global Health and the Law as well as on the Expert Group of the Secretary General’s High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth. Previously, she served on WHO Task Forces on ‘Making Fair Choices Toward UHC’, and ‘Evidence of Impacts of Human Rights-Based Approaches to Women’s and Children’s Health,’ as an Independent Expert to the Colombian Constitutional Court on the Implementation of its 2008 T 760/08 decision restructuring the health system, and on the Oversight Committee of Kenya’s Constitutional Implementation Commission’s work on the right to health. She regularly leads judicial colloquia and strategic litigation courses for practitioners, as well as advising on specific cases, submitting amicus curiae petitions and participating in expert consultations relating to the application of international and constitutional law to health issues.
Yamin is known globally for her pioneering scholarship and advocacy in relation to economic and social rights and rights-based approaches to health. She has contributed to and consulted on the drafting of multiple General Comments by UN treaty bodies, as well as UN Human Rights Council resolutions. She has also participated in and advised on landmark litigations relating to ESC rights, and in particular health- and sexual and reproductive rights, in multiple countries and regions, as well as to supra-national adjudicative bodies.
Yamin is a graduate of Harvard College (summa cum laude), Harvard Law School (cum laude), and the Harvard School of Public Health, where she received both the Samdperil and François-Xavier Bagnoud Awards upon graduation.