Alicia Ely Yamin J.D. (1991), M.P.H. (1996), Ph.D. is a Lecturer on Law and the Director of the Global Health and Rights Project at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics (PFC) at Harvard Law School; Adjunct Senior Lecturer on Health Policy and Management at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health; and Senior Adviser on Human Rights and Health Policy at the global health justice organization, Partners In Health.
Frequently labelled a scholar-activist, she combines academic research and scholarship that bridges law, development, and public health with grassroots work and policy advocacy. She has lived in seven countries on four continents, and worked with and for local advocacy organizations, including co-founding a program on health and human rights in the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (Lima, Peru; 1999).
In the interview below, she shares more about her career and life.
Could you describe the work you do?
It’s hard to put the work I do into a single category. Currently, I combine teaching and research with advocacy work at Partners In Health on themes related to global health justice, such as reimagining development finance and pursuing specific legal changes relating to debt justice.
I’m very fortunate to also work with some of the pioneering leaders of the Green Wave movement for abortion rights and reproductive justice in Latin America. My approach to human rights advocacy, as well as my thinking about international human rights law and comparative law has certainly been shaped by living and working for so many years in Latin America and doing a doctorate in law at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina, where I have family.
In trying to develop non-reformist reforms, it’s been useful to be able to approach issues in ways that are informed by multiple vantage points. I’ve been privileged to be able to work not only with non-governmental and grassroots organizations but also with national governments and courts, as well as with UN bodies. For example, in 2011, I was named by the Colombian Constitutional Court as an Independent Expert on the implementation of T-760/08, a major structural judgment that led to significant health system reform in Colombia. When I lived for years in East Africa, I was the only non-Kenyan appointed to the oversight committee for health matters of the Constitutional Implementation Commission. At the global level, in 2016, Ban Ki Moon, then-UN Secretary General appointed me, as one of ten international experts, to the UN Independent Accountability Panel for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health in the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2020). I’ve had the opportunity to serve on numerous other UN and WHO global expert committees and Lancet Commissions as well.
In every case, having experience on the proverbial ground has been critical to understanding what sorts of reforms might work in practice, as well as what structural constraints will shape the impact of policy recommendations or court judgments.
At the Petrie-Flom Center, you direct the Global Health and Rights Project. Can you share more about that initiative?
The Global Health and Rights Project (GHRP) focuses on four areas in particular: (i) global health law, such as through contributing to cutting edge consensus Principles on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies and expert opinions on aspects of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response; (ii) reproductive justice, with a focus on Latin America; (iii) judicialization of health health (and, increasingly, environmental) rights, also with a focus on Latin America where the phenomenon has been most intense; and increasingly (iv) examining changes in the governance of global health, such as through work with the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, and participation in multiple coalitions around the world to identify pathways and levers for promoting meaningful change.
Although I’m the only Senior Fellow focusing on global health work at PFC, affiliated researchers also contribute enormously to GHRP. Understanding the gross disparities in access to opportunities in academic law and public health, GHRP hosts a cohort of young Latin American scholars and seeks to use the platform Harvard and PFC afford to elevate their voices. The four current GHRP research affiliates focus on: reproductive justice, institutionalized corruption in global health; climate justice and health; and carceral states and health.
Can we unpack the name of the Global Health and Rights Project further? In other words, what does it mean to conceptualize a human rights framework for global health?
Approaches to global health might be broadly divided into those that focus on technology-based medical care and discrete public health interventions, and those that treat health as a complex social phenomenon that acutely reflects patterns of injustice within and between countries. All of the work I do at PFC, as well as part of my broader research and advocacy work adopts the latter approach.
Human rights law has been not the only, but one, critical tool in advancing the health of neglected and excluded populations and reducing discrimination in health in many of the countries in which I’ve lived and worked.
On the other hand, rights do not exist in a vacuum. Applying human rights to health is most successful when it catalyzes a more principled politics and deeper political engagement from social movements and civil society; it is a conceptual and strategic mistake to try to elide those fundamental debates over distributive justice with abstract “human rights policy guidance”. A right to access to medicines can all too easily lead to a windfall for pharmaceutical companies; focusing narrowly on “international assistance and cooperation” for health rights displaces attention from the structural and historically rooted factors in global governance that perpetuate systemic health inequalities within and between countries.
And, as I write in my latest book, When Misfortune becomes Injustice: Evolving Human Rights Struggles for Health and Social Equality, the challenges to advancing global health justice have evolved over these decades as the global embrace of neoliberalism colonized our collective imagination. That has led to ever-deepening inequality within and between countries; the hollowing out of safety nets and social institutions, including health and education systems; the increasing gap in life chances and choices between wage laborers and the masters of capital markets; and the evident failures of public and multilateral institutions to address global crises such as conflict, forced displacement, and climate change. All with massive impacts on population health.
After decades of these tendencies, the institutionalized social order that SARS-CoV-2 struck brings to mind Gramsci’s quote about “the old is dying but the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid signs appear.”
Looking forward, I’m convinced that the most revealing, and often most challenging, issues shaping possibilities for global health justice lie precisely in the points of intersection and friction in the interstices between different fields—law, medicine, and health; human rights and economics — and between their methods and epistemic models. I am so grateful to PFC and the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI) for supporting new stream of interdisciplinary work on evolving governance in global health. And I am thrilled to be able to work with colleagues from across the University — Mary Bassett, Eugene Richardson, Joia Mukherjee, and Jesse Bump, who form part of an inter-faculty Harvard Global Health Institute scholarly working group on “Advancing Global Health Justice.”
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
In advancing social justice, achievements are rarely personal; they are almost always collective. Across the many countries in which I’ve worked, I have been privileged to collaborate with extraordinary lawyers, judges, physicians, nurses, and activists around the world. Although I firmly believe applying human rights to health in transformative ways calls for shifts in strategies in our era of polycrisis (environmental, political, economic), I’m deeply proud of work a multitude of us have been able to do to create a field of health and human rights, or, in reality, a constellation of overlapping fields.
We’ve advanced normative standards in international as well as constitutional law, which, despite what some critics argue, has had impacts on the lives of countless embodied human beings. The U.S. is an outlier among high-income countries; the right to health is now justiciable in so many countries around the world, including very low-income countries. The establishment of a right to health in many of these countries does not just affect adjudication, or even specific legislation; it has entailed shifts in legal consciousness, and transformations in social norms, such as those related to abortion and gender-equality — as well as the restructuring of institutions, including health systems. We have also been able to move beyond legal and policy frameworks to other domains, showing what it means to take human dignity and rights seriously in national planning and budgets, and in institutional practices within health systems.
Early on in my career, countless “experts” pooh-poohed the idea of a right to health. I recall one who told me I might as well dedicate my life to “weaving coats out of butterfly wings.” My advice to young lawyer-activists is not to let anyone tell you that what you want to achieve is impossible.
What is your motto?
I don’t have a motto per se but I subscribe to a quotation from my beloved friend and colleague, the late Dr. Paul Farmer, co-founder of Partners In Health: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.”
What are you reading?
I’m currently reading Tim Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. It’s a great read for anyone who wants to understand the power over global health research and practice exercised by one private foundation, and one man. In conjunction with Harvard Global Health Institute, the Harvard Program on Law and Political Economy, and the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights the Petrie-Flom Center is holding an event with Tim Schwab, the author, on February 22.
Which talent would you most like to have?
There are so many I’d like to have: painting, poetry writing, tango dancing…
