A Pandemic Response and Global Health Architecture Rooted in the Right to Health
The FCGH Alliance welcomes the call of 25 world leaders, including the President of the European Council, Charles Michel and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, for an international pandemic treaty. This initiative opens the space for shaping a global response to prevent and address future pandemics and health crises based on the solidarity and collaboration necessary to confront such challenges.
An international pandemic treaty would be a valuable step towards global cooperation against a shared threat, as we currently face in the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, truly effective global health security will require global cooperation against the shared threat–and injustice–of inequality. WHO Director-General Tedros stressed that “even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots” and that such inequities place the world “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure.” This massive level of inequity at national and global levels requires a systemic response, one grounded in the obligations and principles of human rights, including the right to health.
Fully implementing the right to health requires combatting the root causes of health inequities. The proposal of a Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH), itself grounded in the right to health, is therefore a vital component of developing the global health architecture necessary to effectively prevent and control pandemics and to work towards eliminating health inequities that existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic and have deepened in its wake.
Through its envisioned standards and mechanisms, the FCGH would catalyze the participatory, accountable health systems necessary to build trust among local communities for compliance with measures aimed at controlling pandemics. And beyond that, it would put in place the funding and accountability frameworks required for action on underlying determinants of health and for the health systems strengthening critical to withstanding future pandemics and realizing the right to health.
The FCGH Alliance invites WHO Member States to learn more about the proposal of a Framework Convention on Global Health. We make ourselves available to collaborate on this important initiative from initiation to the state-level ratification processes required to make this vision a reality.
Read more
A Framework Convention on Global Health and Preventing the Next Pandemic
FCGH Alliance Calls for a Human Rights-Based Global Response to COVID-19
On the Framework Convention on Global Health
Contact
Contact Leigh Kamore Haynes with questions about the proposal for a Framework Convention on Global Health and for further discussion.