News & Events
Upcoming Events
Application for Course on Health Rights Litigation
January 24, 2012
Applicants to the Global School on Judicial Enforcement of ESC Rights Course on Health Rights Litigation, to be held June 18-22, 2012, can download the application form here.
The one‐week intensive course offers participants an opportunity to develop specialist‐level knowledge in relation to litigating health‐related rights at the national, regional and international level. The course will cover reproductive and sexual health; rights issues arising in health care settings; abuses in institutional settings; palliative care; access to medicines and approaches to health‐care rationing; structuring remedies to facilitate democratic deliberation; strategies with respect to implementation of structural judgments; and factors to consider in assessing the equity impacts of judgments.
More course information on the Health Rights Litigation course is available here.
Announcing June 2012 Course on Health Rights Litigation
The Health Rights of Women and Children Program at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights is pleased to announce a Course on Health Rights Litigation, part of the Global School on Judicial Enforcement of Economic, Social, and Cultural (ESC) Rights. The week-long course will be held in June 2012 in Boston.
Application and scholarship information will be announced in the spring. Please download and circulate this informational flyer.
Recent News and Events
Theresa Betancourt Publishes New Chapter
December 20, 2011
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Theresa Betancourt, director of the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity, contributed a chapter to The Social Ecology of Resilience. The book, edited by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University and recently released from Springer Press, explores the ways in which school, family, community, and culture can serve as ingredients for resilience or, as the book defines it, positive development under adversity. In her chapter, "The social ecology of resilience in war-affected youth: A longitudinal study from Sierra Leone," Betancourt uses case studies to illustrate the resilience and psychosocial trajectories of war-affected youth from her prospective study.
Recent Coverage of RPCGA Work on Family Strengthening and Former Child Soldiers
December 19, 2011
The RPCGA's Family Strengthening Intervention (FSI) project was recently featured in two stories on the Partners In Health/Inshuti Mu Buzima web page (http://www.pih.org/blog/entry/mapping-the-language-of-mental-health-redefining-care-for-hiv-affected-yout/ and http://www.pih.org/news/entry/in-rwanda-an-orphan-suffering-from-mental-illness-receives-a-new-family/). Aspects of this original research, which aims to develop culturally relevant mental health measures and interventions for children and families affected by HIV/AIDS in Rwanda, have been recently published in Social Science and Medicine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pubmed/21840634) and AIDS Care (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pubmed/21271393).
In September 2011, Child Soldiers International featured a recent publication by faculty member Theresa Betancourt and colleagues on their longitudinal work with former child soldiers in Sierra Leone (http://www.child-soldiers.org/psycho-social/psychosocial). Recent articles on this research have also been published in Child Development (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pubmed/20636683), the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pubmed/20494270), and the Journal of Adolescent Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/pubmed/21700152).
Children’s Hospital Boston Names Inaugural FXB Fellows
November 18, 2011
The FXB Center for Health and Human Rights is pleased to announce that its inaugural fellows have been selected through the Francis-Xavier Bagnoud Center Fellowship Program at the Children’s Hospital Boston’s Center for Global Pediatrics. The two fellows, Lara Antkowiak and Chris Carpenter, will spend the year-long fellowship developing capacity in leveraging pediatric expertise to improve child health in low resource settings.
Antkowiak, MD, MEd, is an attending physician in community pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital Boston Martha Eliot Health Center, and 2009-2011 Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Global Health Fellow. For her fellowship, she will work on a pilot project partnering “Madres Ejemplares,” (Model Mothers) who have expertise breastfeeding their children, with trained Community Health Workers (CHWs) to educate and support breastfeeding mothers in the barrios of Consuelo, Dominican Republic. If the role of “Madres Ejemplares” is found to positively impact breastfeeding education, this programmatic concept can be scaled up to improve the efficacy of community breastfeeding education in other resource-poor settings. Children’s Hospital Boston is collaborating with Divina Providencia Health Center in Consuelo, La Leche League DR, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to develop innovative breastfeeding education programming that can change child health in the Dominican Republic and beyond.
Carpenter, MD, is currently working at St. Mark’s Hospital in Haiti, where he is improving pediatric care by training local doctors and nurses. During his fellowship, he will develop and pilot a nursing apprenticeship program in advanced neonatal nursing care at San Nicholas Hospital in St. Marc, Haiti. The program will pair two nursing leaders with US-based nursing mentors, and will develop and implement a curriculum to train them in advanced neonatal care. The ultimate goal is to produce two exceptional neonatal nurses who can then become neonatal nurse educators throughout Haiti.
Alicia Ely Yamin Publishes Chapter
Alicia Ely Yamin, Director of the Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children (HRWC) contributed to the recently released book The Local Relevance of Human Rights, edited by Koen de Feyter, Stephan Parmentier, Christiane Timmerman, and George Ulrich, which examines how human rights offer protection to disadvantaged groups at the local level. Yamin's chapter, "Building rights-based health movements: lessons from the Peruvian experience" was co-written with J. Jaime Miranda. The book is available from Cambridge University Press.
Harvard Public Health Review Profiles Theresa Betancourt
Dr. Theresa Betancourt, director of the FXB Center's Research Program on Children and Global Adversity, is profiled in the Fall issue of the Harvard Public Health Review. The interview focuses on Betancourt's research into the emotional fate of former child soldiers.
Read the full article.
Book Release: Alicia Ely Yamin's "Litigating Health Rights"
Alicia Ely Yamin, Director of the Program on the Health Rights of Women and Children (HRWC) and Siri Gloppen, Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, Norway, are the editors of "Litigating Health Rights: Can Courts Bring More Justice to Health?" released this month from Harvard University Press.
The book, part of the publisher's Human Rights Program Series, examines the potential of litigation as a strategy to advance the right to health by holding governments accountable for these obligations. It includes case studies from Costa Rica, South Africa, India, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia, as well as chapters that address cross-cutting themes.
"Litigating Health Rights" is available for purchase from Harvard University Press.
Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health Releases 2011 Report
On September 20, the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (PMNCH) of the World Health Organization released the 2011 report, "Analyzing the Commitments to Advance the Global Strategy for Women's and Children's Health," a one-year assessment of commitment to the Global Strategy. Alicia Yamin, Director of the FXB Center's program on the Health Rights of Women and Children, is one of ten international experts to develop the report, which hails a significant increase in financial and political commitments to improve the health of women and children.
Using a partner-centric approach, the mission of PMNCH is to support the global community to work successfully towards MDGs 4 and 5 through the promotion of evidenced-based practices, continuation of advocacy for policy and financial support, and accountability for global commitments.
The full PMNCH report is available for download.
Dr. Jacqueline Bhabha Explores Child Statelessness as Human Rights Issue
In "Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge," FXB Center Research Director Dr. Jacqueline Bhabha examines how statelessness affects children throughout the world and considers the problem from a human rights perspective. As editor, Bhabha presents three manifestations of statelessness (legal, de facto, and effective), and the human rights repercussions stemming from each. The book includes chapters on Palestinian children in Israel, undocumented young people seeking higher education in the United States, unaccompanied child migrants in Spain, Roma children in Italy, irregular internal child migrants in China, and children in mixed legal/illegal families in the United States.
Dr. Bhabha is the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, the Director of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies, and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School. From 1997 to 2001 she directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. Her writings on issues of migration and asylum in Europe and the United States include a coauthored book, Women's Movement: Women Under Immigration, Nationality and Refugee Law and an edited volume, Asylum Law And Practice in Europe and North America.
"Children Without a State" is available from MIT Press.
Dr. Leaning in The Lancet: "Fighting a War, Sparing Civilians"
Marking the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, The Lancet's September 3 issue reflects on the long-term physical, mental, and public health consequences of the disaster. The issue features a comment from FXB Center Director Dr. Jennifer Leaning and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's Dr. Michael Lappi. In their piece, titled "Fighting a war, sparing civilians," Leaning and Lappi assert that in today's unconventional combat operations, there is a heightened need to prepare soldiers to observe the laws of war in order to protect civilians from atrocities.
Leaning and Lappi's comment appears in Volume 378, Issue 9794, pp. 857-859. The full text is available here.
Webcast: "Disaster Response: A Decade of Lessons Learned Post-9/11"
On September 6, The Forum at Harvard School of Public Health hosted "Disaster Response: A Decade of Lessons Learned Post-9/11" in collaboration with Reuters. FXB Center Director Jennifer Leaning participated as an expert panelist.
Watch the webcast of the discussion.
