Alliance For Health Promotion Statement to ECOSOC High-Level Segment
FCGH Alliance member Alliance for Health Promotion (A4HP) submitted the following statement to the 2021 High-Level Segment (HLS) of the Economic and Social Council. This year’s HLS will focus primarily on COVID-19 and its impact on the implementation of the Decade of Action for Sustainable Development and the necessary recovery to build the world as envisioned in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In its statement, A4HP calls for the FCGH to be part of that vision.
2021 session
13 July 2021 – 16 July 2021
Agenda Item 5
ECOSOC High-level Segment
Statement submitted by Alliance for Health Promotion
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed deep inequities leaving us to question whether our efforts as a global community truly rise to the call of a core principle of the SDGs, “ensuring that no one is left behind”. The Alliance for Health Promotion sees such inequities, particularly in the unequal distribution of the burden of COVID-19 on some of the most vulnerable people, as wholly avoidable and unjust and proposes ways forward to ensure policies are in place to address inequities and achieve better health and overall well-being for all.
The Alliance for Health Promotion finds realization of the right to health for everyone as critical to leaving no one behind on our path towards building an inclusive and effective path for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda. This entails enabling people to increase control over and improve their health, and the proposed Framework Convention on Global Health, FCGH, will steer us toward this end. The FCGH is based in the right to health and aimed at national and global health equity. Through the treaty, health ministries and governments would have a tool to realize the right to health for their populations. The mechanisms and standards the treaty proposal embodies would empower populations to claim the right to health, including a comprehensive regime of accountability that would underpin the treaty’s power.
The FCGH would be well-placed to address social, economic, and commercial determinants of health as the current proposal is crafted to address the right to health among all actors and across sectors, including curbing corporate practices harmful to health such as food and beverage marketing or environmental degradation that contribute to cardiovascular or respiratory conditions. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, such treaty provisions aimed tackling root causes of underlying conditions that contribute to hospitalization and death during health emergencies would save countless lives. Most critically, the FCGH would improve participation and equity, building trust among local communities in their interactions with the health system. The FCGH would be an invaluable instrument to accelerate progress towards the SDGs and tackle the unconscionable inequities within and between countries.
The Alliance for Health Promotion calls on this body to meaningfully re-envision what is possible in our quest for the world to achieve the SDGs leaving no one behind. Consideration of a FCGH is one bold step forward.