President calls for discourse between economics and human rights

President Michael D Higgins and Dr Jim Browne, President of NUI Galway, at The Human Right to Health meeting at NUIG on Friday. Photograph: Joe OShaughnessy

President Michael D Higgins has called for a deepening of the discourse between economics and human rights, particularly the human right to health.

It is long past time that we moved the human rights discourse out of the legal and academic area, Mr Higgins told a meeting hosted under the presidents ethics initiative at NUI Galway (NUIG) on Friday.

On his recent visit to South Africa, Mr Higgins said he had observed how judicial protection of the right to health has been used to engage with complex issues such as healthcare, budgeting and the provision of retroviral care.

Formal legal protection of the right to health will not, in itself, resolve profound poverty and structural inequality, and the right to health remains essentially a political matterMr Higgins said.

Mr Higgins noted the gap between the revolution in economics and its disconnect from the human rights discourse, and explained that his focus on ethics was influenced by the Bangladeshi-Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen.

He called for greater progress in taking the bold political decision to address these issues.

This year in particular we cannot have more of the same,he said, and 2015 had been regarded as perhaps the most important year for the future of humanity in a generation, with the Post-2015 Development Conference in September in New York and the Climate Change Conference in December in Paris.

These blocking mechanisms of the powerful and the countries that were representing the powerful and representing unaccountable multinationals cannot destroy these important conferences,he said.

Keynote speaker Prof Sofia Gruskin praised Ireland for being one of 163 signatories to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which serves as the main foundational document for the legal obligations stemming from the right to health, but noted that her own country, the US, had not signed up.

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President calls for discourse between economics and human rights