September 18, 2016
WASHINGTON (September 18, 2016) – The O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law today endorses the Every Woman Every Child’s Independent Accountability Panel (IAP) report released Sunday as the 71st Regular Session of the UN General Assembly continues its meeting in New York.
Earlier this year, the UN Secretary-General appointed the panel, which includes Alicia Ely Yamin, program director of the Health and Human Rights Initiative at the O’Neill Institute. The panel was charged with providing the best evidence available and independent analysis on women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health to help ensure accountability to the United Nations’ Global Strategy on Women’s, Children’s, and Adolescents’ Health.
The O’Neill Institute calls for the thorough implementation of the report’s accountability framework.
“We congratulates Alicia and the other members of the IAP on their efforts to infuse human rights into Sustainable Development Goals implementation and to ground health systems in human rights,” says Oscar A. Cabrera, executive director of the O’Neill Institute. “The framework’s emphasis on remedies rounds out a cycle of accountability that must include, but extend beyond, the traditional emphasis on monitoring and evaluation if both the right to health and other health-related rights are to be realized. This report is intended help to catalyze the use of national, regional, and global legal accountability mechanisms – and vitally, ensure that all people, with special attention to the most marginalized, have the resources and respect that empower their ability to access them.”
Cabrera says, “If all stakeholders in the Global Strategy can work towards implementing these recommendations, the report will have had a central role in enabling people to be rights-holders in more than name only.”
Yamin and Cabrera are available for interviews today by contacting Karen Teber km463@georgetown.edu.
The O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University is the premier center for health law, scholarship, and policy. Its mission is to contribute to a more powerful and deeper understanding of the multiple ways in which law can be used to improve the public’s health, using objective evidence as a measure. The O’Neill Institute seeks to advance scholarship, science, research, and teaching that will encourage key decision-makers in the public, private, and civil society to employ the law as a positive tool for enabling more people in the United States and throughout the world to lead healthier lives.
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