After the health crisis, “the development of inclusive and resilient health care systems, which is likely to take place under conditions of renewed austerity, should eschew the negative effects on the right to health experienced during the economic crisis of the previous decade”, writes the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, in an article (https://bit.ly/2S19nkL ) published in the “Human Rights Comment” on Thursday 23 April.
Everyone’s right to health requires not only universal health coverage, but also “broader social protection measures are necessary to address entrenched health inequalities”, she stresses.
In Europe, however, we are a long way from that. “The unaffordability of health care has been an important barrier to the full realisation of universal health coverage”, one of the targets of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 3.
An objective reaffirmed by a Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly in October 2019, which also calls on States to “ensure pandemic preparedness”. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)