SEXUAL HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS A legal and ... - The ICHRP

in the regional reviews. This is a strength of the project, as WHO seeks to ensure that policy
makers in many different settings find the materials produced relevant and useful.
The analysis of the eight topics and their importance for sexual health relies on the
contemporary understanding that health and well-being are influenced by material and social
conditions. Health services and health systems as frameworks organizing and ensuring the
appropriate delivery for these services (as well as other key goods and services) are clearly
essential for health. However, they are not the only services and systems that matter for
health. Legal and educational systems, are clearly part of ensuring the highest attainable
standard of physical and mental health. Thus, this project incorporates topics for investigation
in light of the understanding that health is shaped by structural conditions, as well as law and
policy, and not only by the most obvious physical processes of disease, aging, reproduction,
nutrition, exposure to environmental toxins, injury, etc. It is well accepted that the social
determinants of health have effects at individual, group and population levels. This WHO
report stresses, however, that these social determinants are themselves often produced by
state action through law and authoritative policy. Thus, many key material factors affecting
sexual health are often not inevitable or unchangeable, but rather represent discrete choices
made by legislators, administrators, courts and executives.
The legal frameworks and standards which determine so many of the key factors of health
may be in alignment, tension, or contradiction with human rights principles. The promotion
of sexual health is inextricably tied to the promotion of fundamental human rights, such as
non-discrimination, privacy, protection from violence, access to information, and rights to
expression and association, as well as the rights that support meaningful participation in
society and politics. In regard to sexual health, states have made legal and political
commitments to protect the health of people, including sexual health, through the application
of human rights principles, expressed through their national laws, and through commitments
to international and regional human rights treaties and consensus documents. This WHO
report, therefore, proceeds from the premise that law and policy can have strong effects on
sexual health as well as on rights, and that there is a dynamic relationship between the
promotion of fundamental human rights and the promotion of sexual health.
For each of the topics and sub-topics, the reports highlight laws which promote sexual health,
and note laws which are likely to impede or diminish it. This analysis focuses solely on the
formal content of statutes, judicial decisions or other duly enacted laws. This report does not
assess their implementation. Therefore, this report does not evaluate which regions or
countries have succeeded in promoting sexual health and rights in each of the eight topic
areas. Rather, the authors examine contemporary law and policy as representing different
paths through which the social and material conditions that promote (or impede) sexual
health and rights exist.
Many policy makers concerned with sexual health are accustomed to reviewing laws that
explicitly address health (i.e., the regulation and content of health services) for their health
and rights impacts. This review addresses these issues in sections on access to health services
(Chapter 6), as well as health issues that arise in the context of other rights concerns
(mandatory HIV testing, which arises as part of chapter/ section1 on non-discrimination, or
health status testing, which arise in regulation of marriage and family, Chapter 3.)
In addition, this review analyzes laws affecting rights and material conditions that do not on
their face address health, but which, social determinants-based analysis shows, have an effect
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