(Originally posted on Huffington post.)

Though Alyce Driver worked three jobs, none of them provided health insurance. Regular teeth cleaning and yearly physicals for her five children were a luxury she could not afford. One day her twelve-year-old son Deamonte complained of a headache. Seven weeks later, Deamonte was dead.

The diagnosis? An abscessed tooth.

While death from tooth decay may have been common in the middle ages, this was 2007.

And while one certainly still hears of such things in some of the more underserved areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, this was in the capital of the richest country on earth.

Deamonte’s story and those of thousands like him who die every year from preventable disease in the United States underscores what’s wrong with the current health care debate. We should be concerned – appalled – that this can happen in our country. But instead of asking ourselves how to right this wrong, we seem to have let the health care debate become about anything but health care.

This country’s founders believed that every human being was endowed with certain inalienable rights – the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the last century, the global community, led by the efforts of the United States and individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, spelled those rights out. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including… medical care….”

Health care is a human right. Like freedom from torture and ill treatment, equality before the law, and education, health care is something that all of us are entitled to by virtue of being human.

But one would never know that by following the headlines in today’s health care debate. We are preoccupied with questions of cost when it comes to universal coverage, but not when it comes to asking critical questions about an industry that maximizes its profits by denying care. Few are asking the most fundamental question: How can our health care system be overhauled so that it fulfills the human right to health care?

Answering this question is a moral imperative, one that requires us to prioritize principles such as universality, equity and accountability. Americans don’t argue that our elections or judicial system are un-American or negotiable because these processes require government involvement and investment to ensure that they function properly and are accessible to all. And while those seeking to undermine reform rally around cries of “government-run medicine,” our nation’s experience shows such slogans to be both inaccurate and misleading. Publicly-financed health care already exists in Medicare; publicly-operated health care is provided through the VA (with some of the highest patient satisfaction ratings among all health care delivered in the United States); and the postal service, schools, police departments, and fire departments are all “government-run” – and we wouldn’t want to do without them.

America needs a health care system that is equitable and fair. Too many of us suffer from disparities in accessibility and quality of care. For example, there is less than one doctor for every one thousand residents in Appalachia, and black women are more than three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as white women. And even for those who have insurance coverage, studies show that we may be just a medical crisis away from financial ruin. These types of imbalances are contrary to the American ideals of equality and fairness, which demand a health care system that does not discriminate against those who need it most.

The human right to health care requires that government be accountable for fulfilling that right. Health care is a public good, not a commodity and a healthy society benefits all of us. The government has a duty to ensure that the right to health care is being met; it does not have an obligation to provide private sector insurers and middlemen with increasing profits, as the current Wall Street driven model dictates. Through public financing and administration of health care we can minimize the profit incentives to deny care and instead guarantee access to quality care for all.

In his latest weekly address, President Obama recognized that health care is a “core ethical and moral obligation” in a move that may signal a shift in the administration’s messaging back to core human rights principles. Unfortunately, even the best of the health care plans on the table in Congress falls short of this lofty rhetoric. Low-income people would still have to pay up to 12% of their income for private insurance premiums, plus deductibles and co-pays. Middle-income families would get no support at all, yet not buying an insurance policy would be against the law. And millions of people would still be uninsured.

We – and our elected leaders – can do better. We live in a broken system, one where a fatal toothache serves as a dire reminder of how too many Americans not only lack insurance, but lack comprehensive coverage that provides easily-accessible and quality health care. Regulation and tinkering would no doubt make some marginal improvements to our failed system, but we don’t need tinkering. We need a game changer. We need a publicly run, publicly accountable, Medicare-like plan that would put the power back in the hands of those whose human rights and very lives are at stake – people like Deamonte Driver.

(Originally published on the Boston Globe)

On the evening of Sept. 18, 2007, six men broke into the home of Justine Masika Bihamba in Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Bihamba wasn’t home, but six of her children, ages 5 to 24, were. The men, reportedly government soldiers, tied up the children at gunpoint and abused two daughters in their 20s, sexually assaulting one with a knife. Bihamba and her children identified the attackers to military police but authorities refused to arrest the suspects, saying there was no evidence against them. They remain free today.

The men targeted Bihamba’s children because of her work coordinating medical and psychological care for women and girls who have been sexually assaulted. In the violent conflict that has raged in Congo for a decade, rape is a weapon of war.

The conflict has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced more than a million to flee; it is the latest in Congo’s long and bloody history. During the colonial period, ivory and rubber were the prizes for which Europeans sacrificed African lives. Today, the fighting is fueled by the country’s vast mineral resources – diamonds, gold and coltan, which is used in all mobile phones and laptops. Armed groups control mines and export minerals illegally, using the cash to buy arms.

The mineral wealth is of little benefit to the impoverished Congolese population.

More than 1,000 people die daily from preventable diseases such as cholera and dysentery. Most are children. These preventable deaths are human rights abuses in violation of international treaties on the right to health and the rights of the child. Until corporations that benefit from the mineral trade, together with the Congolese government and the international community, are persuaded to end the abuses, cases like Bihamba’s will keep recurring.

Amnesty International campaigns to ensure that human rights defenders like her can carry out their vital work in safety. But to stop the carnage in Congo, we recognize that we must also fight poverty – what Mahatma Gandhi called “the worst form of violence.”

People are accustomed to thinking of human rights violations as abuses committed by repressive regimes – torture, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, enforced “disappearances,” political assassination, and the like.

But the international human rights framework is much broader. Sixty years ago, following the brutality of World War II when the Nazis denied Jews, Roma, gays, and others their very right to exist, the response of the international community was unequivocal – human rights had to be based on the principle of inclusion. That is, everyone is entitled to the same set of rights by virtue of being human. These include the right to freedom from torture and arbitrary imprisonment, and no less importantly, the right to adequate food and shelter, basic healthcare, education and employment. In short, the right to live a life of dignity.

People living in poverty are trapped, much like political prisoners.

Now, as the global economic crisis threatens to push an estimated 53 million more people into poverty this year, Amnesty International is launching the most ambitious campaign of its nearly 50-year history.

Just as we have fought effectively to protect civil and political rights on behalf of tens of thousands of political prisoners, we intend to mobilize our volunteers and supporters to hold governments, corporations, armed groups, and others accountable for the human rights abuses that drive millions around the world into poverty.

Governments have reneged on human rights obligations in the belief that economic growth alone would lift all boats. But now the tide is receding. Virtually none of the growth of the last two decades benefited poor and marginalized communities; instead, the gap between rich and poor only deepened in many parts of the world.

All human rights are interlinked, as the Congo demonstrates. If development was based on the fulfillment of basic human rights instead of skewed toward enriching a few at the expense of many, we might not be witnessing the violent upheaval of Congo and elsewhere.

Without an approach to poverty and development that puts human rights first, there will be many more stories like that of Justine Masika Bihamba.

Just a word of introduction as this is my first post here. My name’s Sameer Dossani and I’m the campaign director for the Demand Dignity Campaign, our campaign to address issues relating to Human Rights and poverty. Prior to working with Amensty, I’ve been in the development world critiquing the policies and projects of the IMF and World Bank on human rights grounds. If you’d like to find out more about the campaign please get in touch through the contact us section of this site.

This post was written as a response to a critique of our annual report from the Aid Watch blog.

Bill Easterly takes on Amnesty International’s 2009 Annual Report. I know and respect Easterly’s work; I’ve even been on a few panels with him over the years on aid effectiveness and the World Bank, but I have to say he’s pretty off base here.

The basic premise of his post is this:

The only useful definition of human rights is one where a human rights crusader could identify WHOSE rights are being violated and WHO is the violator. That is what historically has led to progress on human rights. The government officers of the slave-owning antebellum US and the slave-owners were violating the rights of slaves – leading to activism against such violators that eventually yielded the Emancipation Proclamation. The local southern government officers were violating the civil rights of southern blacks under Jim Crow, leading to activism against these violators that yielded the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The apartheid government officers in South Africa violated the rights of black South Africans, and activism against these violators brought the end of apartheid.

Easterly then claims that poverty does not fit this definition of rights because “who is depriving the poor of their right to an adequate income?”

It’s true that lack of income, in and of itself, isn’t a human rights violation. But poverty is about a lot more than just income. As Easterly knows, those who live on less than a dollar a day are poor not just because they lack income; the lack of income implies lack of access to services, clean drinking water, adequate education, housing, employment and so on. All of these are violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights. To give just one of many possible examples, estimates indicate that as many as 8,000 children die daily in Africa alone from preventable diseases such as cholera and dysentery. It’s certainly true to say that these are diseases of poverty – the rich can ensure that their water is not contaminated and can seek treatment at private hospitals as opposed to understaffed government clinics – but they are more than that. They are violations of the right to health and the right to clean water.

And people living in poverty are vulnerable to violations of their civil and political rights as well. In the Favelas (shanty towns) of Sao Paolo in Brazil, police and gangs are in daily conflict. There are allegations of human rights abuse on all sides, and the government feels little pressure to respect due process in large part because this violence is taking place in an extremely poor part of the city. Ordinary people are in danger from gangs on the one hand and from a state takes their rights less seriously because they live in a poor community.

These are all human rights violations, and it is ultimately the responsibility of governments to end them. In some cases those actually committing the abuse may not be governments; such as when Dow Chemical refuses to clean up the toxic mess that is still poisoning impoverished communities in Bhopal, India from a disaster that killed thousands in 1984. But in all cases it is ultimately the responsibility of governments to ensure that human rights – including the right to live a life of dignity – are respected.

Human rights abuses cause poverty and keep people poor – and living in poverty makes you more likely to suffer violations of your human rights. So human rights must be part of any solution to poverty.