Experience and lessons from health impact assessment for human rights impact assessment

BMC International Health and Human Rights

Mitchell G. Weiss²  Mirko S. Winkler²  Burton H. Singer¹  Mark Wielga³  Gary R. Krieger³  Jürg Utzinger²  Kendyl Salcito³ 

[1] Emerging Pathogens Institute, University of Florida, Gainesville 32610, FL, USA;University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland;NewFields, LLC, Denver 80202, CO, USA

关键词: United Republic of Tanzania;    Industrial agriculture;    Corporate development project;    Human rights impact assessment;    Health impact assessment;   

Others  :  1228172
DOI  :  10.1186/s12914-015-0062-y

 received in 2014-08-28, accepted in 2015-09-03,  发布年份 2015

【 摘 要 】

As globalisation has opened remote parts of the world to foreign investment, global leaders at the United Nations and beyond have called on multinational companies to foresee and mitigate negative impacts on the communities surrounding their overseas operations. This movement towards corporate impact assessment began with a push for environmental and social inquiries. It has been followed by demands for more detailed assessments, including health and human rights. In the policy world the two have been joined as a right-to-health impact assessment. In the corporate world, the right-to-health approach fulfils neither managers’ need to comprehensively understand impacts of a project, nor rightsholders’ need to know that the full suite of their human rights will be safe from violation. Despite the limitations of a right-to-health tool for companies, integration of health into human rights provides numerous potential benefits to companies and the communities they affect. Here, a detailed health analysis through the human rights lens is carried out, drawing on a case study from the United Republic of Tanzania. This paper examines the positive and negative health and human rights impacts of a corporate operation in a low-income setting, as viewed through the human rights lens, considering observations on the added value of the approach. It explores the relationship between health impact assessment (HIA) and human rights impact assessment (HRIA). First, it considers the ways in which HIA, as a study directly concerned with human welfare, is a more appropriate guide than environmental or social impact assessment for evaluating human rights impacts. Second, it considers the contributions HRIA can make to HIA, by viewing determinants of health not as direct versus indirect, but as interrelated.

【 授权许可】

   
2015 Salcito et al.

【 图 表 】

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