Book Review: Health and Human Rights by Thérèse Murphy

Is it sensible for human rights to make use of measurement tools such as indicators? Is the ‘cost’ of human rights an argument that can and should be used by proponents of human rights? In this book Thérèse Murphy aims to chart the history of the linkage between health and human rights. Kate Donald finds that this is an enlightening read that suggests some interesting avenues for human rights practice. Recommended for human rights activists and researchers.

Health and Human Rights. Thérèse Murphy. Hart Publishing. August 2013.

Thérèse Murphy’s contribution to Hart’s Human Rights Law in Perspective series examines the different – and often fascinating – ways that health and human rights have intersected in law, advocacy, and practice. Engaging and very readable, it is a thought-provoking collection for human rights advocates and health activists, although it is unlikely to be a useful resource for newcomers to human rights law. Despite some strange omissions (the universal health care movement is barely mentioned), Murphy certainly succeeds in illuminating some fascinating conundrums within health and human rights, discussing for example how patient autonomy and patient choice – a seemingly unequivocal good – has led to troubling outcomes such as direct-to-consumer marketing by pharmaceuticals.
After an introduction and a chapter focused on the history of health and human rights, Murphy presents four chapters exploring different trends, methods and case studies that illustrate potential avenues and challenges for the field. Most enlightening are the middle two chapters, the first of which focuses on the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in South Africa. TAC was at the vanguard of the health and human rights movement and widely known for securing (at least in theory) access to anti-retrovirals for poor South Africans, first against the callow profiteering of the pharmaceuticals and then against the AIDS-denying South African state. Murphy’s analysis skilfully explores the wider impacts of the TAC’s triumph on the broader health environment in South Africa and on health rights work globally, including for example the accusations that it skewed attention and resources away from other devastating diseases.

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