This month Harvard University Press has become the publisher of Health and Human Rights, an influential journal that for years has been a central node for some of the most important conversations happening at the intersections of health and human rights work around the globe. The journal contributes to fostering a global movement by increasing access to human rights knowledge in the health field, providing an inclusive forum for action-oriented dialogue among human rights practitioners, and linking an expanding community of readers and contributors. The journal, which is freely available online under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, has been edited since 2007 by Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners in Health.
Upon announcing our new relationship with the journal, HUP director William P. Sisler and Jennifer Leaning, who as director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health served as the journal’s previous publisher, said that the collaboration is designed to extend to the broadest possible audience the journal’s mission of advancing the right to health as an essential human right.
“It’s an honor and a pleasure to unite HUP’s mission ‘to advance knowledge’ with the FXB Center’s mission to advance the right to health throughout the world via this crucial open access journal,” said Sisler. At HUP we see the work of the journal as dovetailing with our long history of publishing essential works on justice and human rights, including such influential recent books as Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice and Martha Nussbaum’s Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, as well as John Rawls’s foundational A Theory of Justice.
The journal, which publishes twice yearly, will continue to appear at the URL http://www.hhrjournal.org where an active blog and a regularly updated “Perspectives” section provide additional opportunities for interactive dialogue on pertinent topics and news. The brand-new Issue 15.1, the first to be published by HUP, is a special issue focused on the effort to enact a global treaty grounded in the right to health. The Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH), first proposed in 2008, is an attempt to meet major challenges in global health governance by reaffirming existing right-to-health principles and obligations and codifying newly expanded ones. Keep an eye on the HHR blog and Perspectives, where discussion of the framework laid out in Issue 15.1 will continue.