International socio-economic human rights: the key to global health improvement?

In this paper, the author analyses the international socio-economic human rights system to establish whether its underlying discourses, scope, structure, and functioning adequately account for the values encountered by a global distributive justice framework; the principal goal being to assess the human rights system to determine if it can be useful in the redistribution of the benefits arising from medical innovation, taking health needs into consideration. This assessment will draw the foundation for a deeper political analysis of how human rights are conceptualised in order to understand the role of market forces in realising the human right to health. The paper's main conclusion is that the system, as it currently operates, is incompatible with a global distributive justice framework in health.