Health and Human Rights
Vol. 26, Issue 2, Pages 83-36
December 2024
Abstract
The papers selected cover a range of geographic settings—South Africa, Colombia, Greece, Ecuador, and the United States. Despite the very disparate contexts, with enormous differences in the relevant socioeconomic environments, some common themes related to distress migrants’ inadequate access to the right to health emerge. Central among them is the pervasive impact of discrimination, a factor in some cases embedded in national policy, in others manifested in the way that decision-making discretion is exercised. Another is the troubling gap between legal entitlement and actual implementation, between rhetoric and rights in practice—in many contexts, the absence of robust monitoring or supervisory capacity, despite laudable court judgments in some cases, enables rights-violating practices, including the denial or deferral of needed care and the failure to appropriately protect vulnerable populations from predictable medical problems. Finally, all the papers point to the need for greater attention to preventative care, structural and social determinants, and the adoption of nondiscriminatory and equitable standards to further the fundamental goal of securing a universal right to health for all.
Citation
Angeleri, Stefano, and Jacqueline Bhabha. "Promises (Un)fulfilled: Navigating the Gap Between Law, Policy, and Practice to Secure Migrants’ Health Rights." Health and Human Rights 26.2 (December 2024): 83-36.