8 JULY 2024After the Second World War, when the horrors of Nazi atrocities came to light with the discovery of concentration camps in places like Auschwitz, doctors in the Western world were forced to acknowledge medical discoveries based on experiments carried out on concentration camp survivors. This led to the development of a framework for respecting patient autonomy and the principle of informed consent came into medicine. This was followed by the scandal of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where 600 Black men in the US were not told they have syphilis, even when treatment for syphilis was available, for doctors to study the natural course of the disease, which goes completely against the principle of informed consent. These developments in Europe and the USA helped to progress awareness of human rights in medicine. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 enshrined concepts like human dignity, liberty, equality, and the right to life. This led to the European Convention on Human Rights, which included the right to life within it, and gave human rights the force of law by establishing the European Court of Human Rights. Countries like the UK passed the Human Rights Act to make their laws compliant with human rights principles, which included right to life as its first article. We now have the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) passed into law at the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, which recognizes the needs of all persons with disabilities and the need to protect their rights, promoting the concept of equality of opportunity. Each country, including UK, is adapting their systems and law accordingly.Thus, the concept of human rights in medicine seemed well established. However, there are now several areas of challenge. I will illustrate with three examples. The first is Covid 19. It helped to throw light on how healthcare access remains unequal, with economic deprivation directly linked to poorer access to healthcare and the human rights violations which flow from it. There is a public Inquiry going on in the UK currently on how Covid 19 was handled by the THE ROLE OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN MEDICINEBy Piyal Sen, Medical Director and Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist, Elysium HealthcareIN MY OPINIONPiyal Sen
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