Launch of the Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH) Alliance

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (original press release)

The O’Neill Institute is pleased to share a milestone in the progress towards the Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH), a proposed global treaty based on the right to health and aimed at national and global health equity: the formation of a new NGO, the FCGH Alliance, this past Human Rights Day, December 10, 2017.

“For years we have been working with our colleagues to build support for the FCGH. We have always believed that such a treaty could have a transformative role in ending persisting and unconscionable health inequities, much as another treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, has turned the tide on tobacco use,” said Professor Lawrence Gostin, Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute. “For such an esteemed group of individuals and organizations, such as South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign, to be not only willing to support the FCGH, but also to put the energy behind the FCGH to establish a new NGO and to become a core part of the FCGH movement, is a testament to the power of this idea. It gives me great hope that the FCGH can indeed become a reality.”

Added Eric Friedman, the O’Neill Institute’s point person on the FCGH, “We have long hoped that the FCGH could take on a life of its own, and as a colleague used to say, mobilize millions of people behind it. The FCGH movement now does stand on its own. And with the formation of the FCGH Alliance, which anyone can join and which already has among its leaders people who know firsthand what is it to experience health inequities, for the first time mass mobilization and the necessary political support that it can create seems possible. The right to health has just moved a step nearer reality for people for whom it often seems furthest away.”