A critique of human rights based approaches should demonstrate an understanding of human rights based approaches

摘要

Jia-shin Chen's recent commentary (Chen, 2011) 'Beyond human rights and public health: Citizenship issues in harm reduction' demonstrates little understanding of human rights, undermining its central critique.The author frames that critique - of human rights and public health discourses in harm reduction - on an apparent 'antagonism' between the two, based on a short piece published in the International Journal of Drug Policy seven years ago by Neil Hunt ('Public health or human rights: What comes first?', Hunt, 2004). According to Chen 'it is not analytically productive to propose a simple antagonism between human rights and public health as Hunt depicts'. This is true, but the problem is that Hunt's piece did not really do that, apart from in the title. The question of 'what comes first?' was somewhat misleading. This would have been clear from the wealth of health and human rights literature that is available (see, for example, Mann et al., 1994; volumes 1-13 of Health and Human Rights, 1994-2011; and The Lancet special edition on the right to health, 2008), including the considerable amount on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS, 2006; UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2003) and that specific to harm reduction (for a review see Jurgens, Csete, Amon, Baral, & Beyer, 2010). But none of this is referenced in Chen's piece.