With the submission window for its June 2014 Climate Justice issue recently closed, Health and Human Rights, the peer-reviewed open access journal of which we assumed publication this year, seeks papers for its December 2014 special issue on Health Rights Litigation. The journal, edited by Partners in Health co-founder Paul Farmer, intends the issue to disseminate findings related to the Health Rights Litigation course sponsored by the Global School on the Enforcement of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (the Global School):
For this special issue, Health and Human Rights welcomes articles that explore issues related to health rights litigation. We are particularly interested in receiving articles from Global School Health Rights Litigation course participants that examine health rights litigation in view of the various topics explored in the course, including reproductive and sexual health; 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 and broad participation; strategies with respect to implementation of collective and structural judgments; and factors to consider in assessing the equity impacts of judgments, which include but go beyond income, gender and marginalized status and have left people with inadequate information to promote their own health rights, and undermined their power and means to manage risks to their health; and have left unchallenged gross inequities in the distribution of resources for health, including a lack of attention to vulnerable groups.
While issues of the journal frequently focus on special topics, each also includes a section of general health and human rights papers, some of which become available prior to issue publication, expediting access to new research. Authors may submit such work at any time; the journal’s general call for papers is as follows:
Original articles (research, commentary, and analysis) suitable for scholarly peer review are invited (3,500–7,000 words). In addition to research papers, we seek manuscripts that emerge from and reflect on practical efforts for the realization of social and economic rights (up to 7,000 words). The form and style of these pieces is flexible, but they should be of genuine relevance to people engaged in related work. Like all other submissions, papers for this section will be peer reviewed.
Health and Human Rights welcomes articles that explore the centrality of the right to health in all social, economic, cultural, and environmental contexts. We are interested particularly in the themes of (1) climate change and the right to health; (2) health rights and effectiveness of international treaty law; (3) interdisciplinary explorations of health and human rights; (4) rights-informed innovations in health program design; (5) health and human rights as “well-being.” Topics might include (but are not limited to): women’s health, maternal mortality, refugees and other vulnerable populations, asylum, children and adolescents at risk, current conflicts in civil disturbances, environmental concerns, global health delivery, sustainable development goals/post 2015 development agenda, community mobilization, and new developments in human rights that relate to health and international law.
The editors also invite short letters, brief research or fieldwork summaries, and short opinion or perspective essays (up to 2,500 words) for publication as “Letters to the Editor.”
This December’s issue, a collaboration with the Open Society Foundation’s Law and Health Initiative, will focus on human rights in patient care.
