“It is my aspiration that health will finally be seen not as a blessing to be wished for, but as a human right to be fought for.”  Kofi Annan

A child dies from an easy to cure diarrhoea. A patient succumbs to AIDS because effective drugs were too expensive. Is that bad luck? Or is it a human rights violation as serious as a political dissident being tortured in prison? Is the right to health more costly than the right to vote? Access to health is now rec-ognized as a human right, but it is often considered a “second class” right when compared to civil and political rights – a right that needs financial means to be implemented.

Better access to health for everyone is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. The obstacles are numerous. It is often said that “the main cause of ill health is poverty”. The right to health can be linked to the environment, the social system, working conditions, rules governing the economy and business, intellectual property rights, governance, scientific research etc.

And let’s not forget that in developing countries a majority of the population uses traditional medicine (eg. 85% of Africans) as their principal means of health protection. By tapping into this inherited medical knowledge along with western medicine, access to appropriate treatment within the overall contect of economic and cultural conditions in the developing world could be improved. An adequate recognition of traditional knowledge is a highly disputed issue, currently negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization.

How can we guarantee a right to health everywhere in the world? What should industrialised countries, the pharmaceutical industry, international and non-governmental organisations be doing? This crucial challenge for the life of billions of people both in the North and South still remains largely uncovered by the media. Our workshop gathers representatives of the main actors dealing with various aspects of access to health, including some of the hot issues of today.

The workshop is supported by the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development, and or-ganised by the InfoSud press agency, and its online journal Human Rights Tribune. This interactive debate is linked to the Media21 Global Journalist Training Programme run by InfoSud, in collaboration with the Geneva Press Club. Some presentations will be in English, others in French.

Invitation & Program in PDF