Evening Exchanges: The Role of Law in Global (and National) Health Governance

This roundtable will explore the potential and challenges of harnessing law, including international human rights law, to promote equity and accountability in health systems and global health governance.  Agenda 2030, and the Sustainable Development Goals, which followed the Millennium Development Goals, sets out an ambitious agenda on an array of issues of global health. The SDGs, as opposed to the MDGs, set out a universal framework that is applicable to high-income and low-income countries alike, and concentrates in inequalities.  Achieving goals, such as in health, are explicitly acknowledged to be connected to other goals, such as sustainable production, gender equality, and effective and transparent institutions. The ongoing Lancet-Georgetown/O’Neill Commission on Global Health and the Law examines how law can be used to translate vision into action on sustainable development and a number of UN groups are examining how legal reform and enforcement can be used to strengthen accountability in global health.

The UN Secretary General’s Independent Accountability Panel for the Global Strategy on Women’s Children’s and Adolescent Health (IAP) will be exploring the multiple layers of laws and institutions required to private sector accountability for their role in global health. This role goes beyond provision of services or medicines and commodities to influencing health, through direct consumption patterns, as well as creating social norms, and influencing political processes, as well as financing development. This brings into focus the tremendous array of legal forms and spaces, from regulatory frameworks to judicial enforcement to securities, tax and trade legislation in other countries.  But there are many challenges to harnessing laws to effectively regulate the asymmetries of power and lack of accountability that pervades national health systems as well as global health architectures, due among other things to public incapacity and sometimes capture. Moreover, of course, often laws are punitive and discriminatory and have negative effects on both health of certain populations, as well as on inclusive democracy.This panel will explore the potential and challenges of harnessing law, including international human rights law, to promote equity and accountability in health systems and global health governance. Discussion will include concrete experiences from different regions that offer lessons (positive and negative), as well as analysis of the global stage.

Introduction by Alicia Yamin

With  Johan Dahlstrand (SIGHT, Sweden),  Ephrem T. Lemango (Ministry of Health, Ethiopia), Ole Frithjof Norheim (UiB), Danielle Rached