Frequently Asked Questions | Right to Health Policy Hub

General Questions
What Documents are included in Right To Health Policy Hub?
What is the purpose of Right To Health Policy Hub?
What is the Right To Health Policy Hub language?
How often is the Right To Health Policy Hub updated?
How is the information at Right To Health Policy Hub shown and organized?
How To Find Information?
How do I search for specific topic areas?
How can I retrieve relevant documents from the database?
How do I search for information particularly relevant for one country?
How do I find the original source of a document?
How can you contribute to the database expansion?

What Documents are included in Right To Health Policy Hub?

Right To Health Policy Hub contains human rights documents issued by international human rights treaty bodies and United Nations Special Reports on the rights to health, adequate food and nutrition, and cultural rights. The concluding observations included dates from 2005 onwards. General recommendations and Special Rapporteur’s reports are available from all periods.
Documents from the following official UN websites are included in Right To Health Policy Hub:

The Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) and the Committee on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). The CRC, the CESCR and the CEDAW are responsible for monitoring the International Covenant on the Rights of the Child, the International Covenant on Economic, Social & Cultural Rights and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, respectively. These bodies monitor the implementation of the human rights treaties and their optional protocols.

Special Rapporteurs are independent experts who are appointed in their personal capacity to monitor and promote specific human rights and raise awareness for certain thematic areas or country-specific perspective. Among other several duties, Rapporteurs produce thematic reports, conduct country visits, promote interactive dialogues, and understand claims due to human rights violations. They belong to the Special Procedures Monitoring Mechanism of the Human Rights Council. More information about their work can be found in the official UN website of Special Procedures.

Right To Health Policy Hub contains three different types of resources:

Topic-specific general comments or recommendations: These are relevant globally and contain official interpretations of the treaty provisions, thematic areas, government obligations, specific rights and other issues. These have authoritative status and provide valuable guidance on harmonizing public health policies with human rights standards.
Country-specific concluding recommendations: These recommendations are issued by treaty bodies following a state reporting cycle. Under the international human rights treaties, State Parties are obligated to submit initial and periodic reports every two to five years. This reporting process serves as an avenue for non-governmental organizations, civil society members, and institutions to contribute valuable information on human rights conditions within a country. After examining reports submitted by a state party regarding its treaty compliance and shadow reports by non-governmental actors, treaty bodies conduct an overall assessment and review and make concluding recommendations based on the review process, acknowledging positive measures taken and recommending further actions to enhance the treaty implementation. The countries covered in the database are those in which CTFK and GHAI are currently working on, with potential geographical expansion in the future. If you’d like to review other countries’ reports, please visit the UN Treaty Bodies Database.
Statements, thematic reports or other documents from UN Special Reports: these documents are issued by these UN Special Procedure on particular issues under their mandate They have global relevancy and play a key role in standard setting, influencing the interpretation of international human rights law.

What is the purpose of Right To Health Policy Hub?

Human rights represent a key international law area to advance global, regional and national public health policies. This database seeks to inform, support and serve as a legal research tool for advocacy purposes to inform policy making, by:

Promoting the understanding of human rights law for different audiences, including government obligations and corporations' duty to respect human rights. This entails identifying trends and patterns in the interpretation of human rights treaties that can directly impact tobacco control, food policy and other public health areas.
Serving as evidence for policy development and CSOs legal work such as litigation, legal drafting, countering industry arguments against public health policies or human rights, and challenge measures that are detrimental to public health. Country-specific concluding recommendations, in particular, can be used to call on specific States’ human rights obligations.
Cultivating human rights knowledge to engage with UN human rights treaty bodies to present shadow reports.
Generating awareness and public support for human rights. Right To Health Policy Hub could be used as a resource for the development of communications campaigns of advocacy efforts.
Encouraging international collaboration among countries with similar contexts to respect, promote and fulfil human rights.
Building a repository for researchers and academics to conduct studies to support public health policy advocacy efforts.

Moreover, each result will have a recommended standardized citation for users to copy and paste when using paragraphs found in the database.

What is the Right To Health Policy Hub language?

The database has been developed in English for now, but each result of the database will have a link to its location in the official UN website where you can find it in different languages and formats

How often is the Right To Health Policy Hub updated?

Right To Health Policy Hub will be updated annually. The last updated date is shown.... has been done in September, 2023.

How is the information at Right To Health Policy Hub shown and organized?

Right To Health Policy Hub contains more than 200 entries of specific paragraphs from general comments, concluding observations and thematic reports from UN Special Reports. The database contains multiple filters so you can research the data you need according to the criteria you need, as follows:

Type of document: General comments/recommendation, concluding observation or thematic reports/other resources from UN Sp. Reports.
Region and country/jurisdiction
UN treaty body or rapporteur that issued it

Additional tags can be used to streamline your search:

Subject matter: Food policy, Tobacco control, other public health areas.
Regulatory intervention: this tag contains multiple policy areas under each subject matter tag.
Human rights at stake.
General tags: these contain other general areas to filter searches that wouldn’t be found with previous tags.
Specific groups affected: this tag is applied when there is reference to particular groups made such as girls and women, children, and others.

How do I search for specific topic areas?

Use the Topic filter to find relevant resources.

How do I search for information particularly relevant for one country?

Use the country or region filter to find relevant resources.

How can I retrieve relevant documents from the database?

Use the different filters such as Topic, Document Type, Policy Area, Human Rights and specific Groups Affected to target your search.

You can also search by Keyword.

If you would like to download the results of your research, you can click the “Download PDF” button to retrieve a PDF with all the selected paragraphs.