Activities January-March 1999
Executive Summary
The first three months of 1999 saw the Center involved in a variety of activities both within the school and internationally.
A great deal of attention was focused in this period on the follow-up activities and five-year reviews of both the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women. The Center was involved in a variety of meetings with nongovernmental organizations and academic institutions from all regions of the world prior to the March meetings of the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Work to ensure some mechanisms for governmental accountability under these documents will remain a Center priority in 1999.
This period also saw the publication of Health and Human Rights: A Reader, edited by Jonathan Mann, Sofia Gruskin, Michael Grodin, and George Annas. The paperback edition is being well publicized and its available on Amazon.com as well as in bookstores throughout the country is helping to increase not only the book’s visibility but also that of the Center. Center staff undertook a number of other activities in this period, including plenary presentations at two major HIV/AIDS conferences and increased attention to the Center’s work with UNAIDS and other actors within and around the UN system. Work on the Center’s research projects, both with its UN partners and through the Enhancing Care Initiative, continued in this period. Jointly with the Harvard AIDS Institute, the Center has also been contributing to the preparation of a symposium on HIV/AIDS to be held in Bangkok, Thailand in late April. Developments have included hiring of consultants to carry out discrete tasks, increased attention to the substance and content of these projects, and the creation of solid work plans for the coming period.
Following are the activities that marked the first quarter of 1999.
Core Activities
Education and Training
Academic Courses
The new HSPH course Women, Gender and Health, taught by Sofia Gruskin and Nancy Krieger, concluded during this period. Students were extremely enthusiastic about the course, and plans are already underway for its continuation next year.
The HSPH Health and Human Rights course, taught by Sofia Gruskin, was offered in this period. Students were enrolled from several different departments at HSPH—Population and International Health, Health and Social Behavior, and Maternal and Child Health—as well as from the Harvard School of Education and MIT. The students, all lively and engaged, possessed a wide breadth of experience, making up the strongest group the course has attracted so far.
Global Initiatives
Operationalizing Cairo and Beijing: A Training Initiative in Gender and Reproductive Health.
Plans for the regional courses continue to progress. Center staff will be teaching in the South Africa course in May. There has been much interaction with the various site partners. The Chinese, Argentinian, and Australian teams all made significant progress in this period.
The Global Coordinating Committee has begun to plan for a November meeting in Heidelberg to prepare for the Regional Evaluation Workshop (REW) and to begin structuring the final global curriculum. Also in this period, Bellagio, Italy was confirmed as the site of the REW, to be held in February 2000.
Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic (MAP) Network
The report from the MAP meeting on Eastern Europe, as well as the 1998 global report The Status and Trends of the HIV/AIDS Epidemics in the World, were published during this period. Both reports are now available on the Center’s web site.
In this period the MAP Secretariat is being transferred to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, who will host it for the remainder of the year.
UN Commission on the Status of Women
Center staff attended the 43rd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, held in New York in March. The two critical areas of concern from the Beijing Platform being negotiated by governments were Women and Health and Institutional Mechanisms. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of several groups, the outcome of the session proved extremely disappointing, as governments succeeded in stripping away their legal accountability for implementation of the Platform in a number of ways.
Dissemination of Information
Health and Human Rights
Preparations continued for the next two issues of the journal.
Vol. 4 No. 1, to appear in late May, is a mixed issue, covering topics ranging from tuberculosis in prisons to the health and human rights of a Peruvian indigenous group. The issue will also include two extensive bibliographies on health and human rights.
Vol. 4 No. 2, to appear in November, will be a special theme issue on reproductive rights. Nafis Sadik, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNFPA, will be contributing a commentary. Several other prominent scholars and activists have already agreed to contribute articles; still others are currently being approached.
With help from the HSPH Development Office, FXB Center staff submitted funding proposals for the journal to several different foundations during this period.
Significant attempts to improve the visibility of the journal were made in this period. The journal is now abstracted and indexed in ASSIA: Applied Social Science Index and Abstracts, Geographical Abstracts: Human Geography, International Development Abstracts, MEDLINE, PAIS International, Periodica Islamica, Social Planning/Policy and Development Abstracts, and Sociological Abstracts.
Health and Human Rights Reader
Health and Human Rights: A Reader, edited by Jonathan Mann, Sofia Gruskin, George Annas, and Michael Grodin, appeared in February. Routledge, the publisher, has begun marketing the book, and Center staff are working to publicize it as well.
Memorials to Jonathan Mann
In this period, Center staff wrote several obituaries commemorating Jonathan’s life that were published in a number of places, including HRI’s Human Rights Tribune.
AIDS, Health and Human Rights: An Action Kit
This handbook, to be published jointly by the FXB Center and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, is a companion volume to AIDS, Health and Human Rights: An Explanatory Manual. It is designed to complement the Manual by providing practical information and guidance about how to respond to specific situations involving human rights and AIDS, and how to apply methods and strategies explained in the manual.
Oxford Textbook of Public Health
Sofia Gruskin and Daniel Tarantola will be contributing the overview chapter on Public Health and Human Rights to a new edition of the Oxford Textbook of Public Health. They prepared and submitted an outline to the editors for review in this period.
Poster Day at HSPH
Center staff created a poster to exhibit at the annual HSPH Poster Day in March, focusing on the Center’s recent work on children’s rights in the context of HIV/AIDS. Center staff also worked with the Harvard AIDS Institute on a poster explaining the Enhancing Care Initiative.
Other Presentations/Guest Lectures
On March 24, Sofia Gruskin gave the Jonathan Mann Memorial Lecture, a talk entitled "HIV/AIDS, Health and Human Rights: The Legacy of Jonathan Mann (1947–1998)," at the opening plenary session of the 1999 National HIV/AIDS Update Conference. Nearly 2000 people were in attendance at this year’s conference, focusing on the topic Partnering Science and Practice. Fellow presenters included Dr. Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. Surgeon General. The plenary session was followed by a press conference and communication with a number of organizations interested in possible collaboration.
On February 25, Sofia Gruskin was invited to give a talk at the Yale University School of Public Health entitled "What Do Human Rights and Public Health Have to Do with Each Other?" and to facilitate a discussion with faculty members and students on how the school might incorporate the study of health and human rights into its curriculum.
On February 18, Sofia Gruskin was a guest lecturer at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in Professor Jane Schaller’s course The Children’s Rights Movement. Sofia spoke on "The Right to Health: What Does It Mean?"
On January 22, Sofia Gruskin spoke at the American Bar Association’s national invitational symposium "HIV/AIDS and the Law: An Agenda Beyond the Millenium" in Washington, DC. Her talk was entitled "The International Face of HIV/AIDS into the 21st Century." The symposium was attended by legal scholars and practitioners, representatives from the advocacy community, members of the judiciary, and individuals from the medical, public health, and policy communities.
Research
Enhancing HIV/AIDS Care Initiative
This project is jointly carried out by the Harvard AIDS Institute, the FXB Center, other entities within Harvard, and counterpart institutions in Brazil, Senegal, and Thailand. Working with FXBC, ECI project members have been developing a conceptual framework on how to assess, plan for, and evaluate care for people living with HIV/AIDS, which includes human rights and gender-sensitive approaches. Given the specific gender focus of the Brazil team’s research, Sofia Gruskin has agreed to be the official HSPH contact person for the Brazilian team.
WHO Research Agenda in the Area of Reproductive Rights as They Relate to Reproductive Health
This research project, a joint effort of the FXB Center and the Human Reproductive Program at WHO, continues. Its goal is to define a research agenda in the area of reproductive rights and laws as they relate to reproductive health, aiming particularly at measuring the impact of governmental commitments concerning such factors as education and employment and their impact on the status of women’s reproductive health.
Study on National and International Funding of National AIDS Programs
This study, conducted with UNAIDS, is in its final phase of follow-up with donors and countries. Center staff went to Geneva to review the most recent data with UNAIDS and discuss the major findings. These discussions led to significant revisions in the final report, to be published in April.
Linkages and Partnership
Consortium for Health and Human Rights
The Consortium continues to meet regularly. Plans for 1999 include a focus on improving the organizational structures of student health and human rights groups around the country.
UNAIDS
Negotiations were completed on the umbrella contract with UNAIDS for a number of projects set to begin later this year. Center staff traveled to Geneva to begin meeting with UNAIDS staff about the specific content of the projects and to finalize the contractual arrangements.
Projects agreed upon to date include:
working with host governments on model reports to two Human Rights Treaty Bodies that incorporate HIV/AIDS;
- developing training modules on Children and Young People: AIDS, Health and Human Rights;
- developing a UNAIDS strategy on AIDS and human rights;
- authoring a Technical Update on HIV/AIDS and human rights; and
- creating several publications concerning HIV/AIDS and the rights of the child for use by the Committee on the Rights of the Child.
Amnesty International
The FXB Center continues to engage in a number of activities with Amnesty International. Sofia Gruskin continues her involvement as a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors. In this quarter the Board met with former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in Atlanta, GA to discuss issues of mutual concern.
Conference on Humanitarian Action
Sofia Gruskin was invited to serve on the Scientific Committee of a high-level international conference entitled Saving Human Lives in the Midst of Conflict: From Humanitarian Action toward Humanizing Government Action, to be held in Paris in early July 1999. The first organizational step will be a working session in Paris in May. The journal Foreign Affairs will be publishing the most interesting papers from the conference.
At HSPH and Harvard
The HSPH Working Group on Women, Gender and Health (WGH) continues to meet regularly.
Multimedia
Web Page
Center staff are beginning to explore ways of better promoting the page, including submitting data to internet search engines. Center staff also worked with the Association François-Xavier Bagnoud to streamline the links from the AFXB’s web page to the Center’s.
FXB Center Seminar Series
The Seminar Series presented two speakers during this period. On February 9, Dr. Stephen Marks of Columbia University spoke on "Human Rights, the International System, and Health Policy." On March 11, Dr. Carola Eisenberg of Physicians for Human Rights spoke on "The Effect of War on Children."
The Library of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center
Many students used the library during this period, and organizational work continued.