Bioethics and Human Rights in the Constitutional Formation of Global Health

“Global health” is an increasingly important area of research and practice, concerned with the profound implications of globalisation for individual and communal health (particularly in developing countries) and focused on achieving health equity for all people worldwide. As such, it is often viewed as overlapping with public health and, thus, conceptually distinct from the field of biomedicine and bioethics. Both fields bear an uneasy relationship with the field of human rights, which remains largely unexplored. The paper constructively utilises insight derived from theories of global legal pluralism and global constitutionalism to argue, perhaps controversially, that recent developments in international biomedical law and bioethics, constitute an important phase in the constitutional construction of a global health law system. In doing so, the paper analyses the role of human rights in the growing constitutional autonomy and organization of global health.