Right to health

My guest today is Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng.

She was most recently the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health, a medical doctor specializing in women's health, and a political leader in South Africa.

And at this moment, her intersectional lens that she brings to the world is exactly what we need to make sense of Ebola and its broader meaning.

Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, welcome to Global Order.

So I wanna dive right into where we are as we are recording this right now.

We are in the middle, I hope the middle, certainly at the beginning, of an outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, um, worldwide.

And you are the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, a physician, a women's health doctor who's really spent the last decade trying to draw the attention of the world to these ways in which the gender, race, and power context of the world play out in people's health, in people's bodies.

And so I wanna ask you about a kind of stat that's out from, from UN Women that says for 50 years, women have been o- overrepresented in Ebola deaths.

And HABS disease is one of those leading NCDs that we suffer from.

Now, to the question you've asked, I think know there's no easy way to answer that because there's no way we can address that question without thinking about the governance failures the systemic failures the structural failures the failure in planning in investments in strengthening you know our health system to be able to deliver you know health care in a way that advances the right to health and health justice I would say that the issues implicate a health injustice,

you

know.

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is a special treaty-building mechanism of the UN system that have invested with the interpretive power to be able to sort of like explain what a treaty provision is.

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has produced a very consequential document, software instrument called General Comment 14.

General comment 14 on the meaning of the right to health provided under Article 12.

It says that in all its form and all its manifestations, the right to health implicates availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality of health tools and services.