The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the need to expand the focus of human rights discourse beyond just political and civil rights.
Paul Farmer highlights the historical focus of the human rights community on political and civil rights, acknowledging the importance of this focus. However, he urges a shift in perspective to consider broader human rights issues, suggesting that the community must expand its understanding and approach to encompass a wider range of human rights challenges, beyond the traditional scope.
In practice
During a human rights conference, this quote can be cited to encourage discussion on broader rights issues.
If any country was a mine-shaft canary for the reintroduction of cholera, it was Haiti - and we knew it. And in retrospect, more should have been done to prepare for cholera... which can spread like wildfire in Haiti... This was a big rebuke to all of us working in public health and health care in Haiti.
I recommend the same therapies for all humans with HIV. There is no reason to believe that physiologic responses to therapy will vary across lines of class, culture, race or nationality.
With rare exceptions, all of your most important achievements on this planet will come from working with others- or, in a word, partnership.
It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care.
The poorest parts of the world are by and large the places in which one can best view the worst of medicine and not because doctors in these countries have different ideas about what constitutes modern medicine. It's the system and its limitations that are to blame.
There is nothing wrong with underlining personal agency, but there is something unfair about using personal responsibility as a basis for assigning blame while simultaneously denying those who are being blamed the opportunity to exert agency in their lives
No practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us.
Everyone—all of us, every last person on God’s earth—deserves decent shelter. It speaks to the most basic of human needs—our home—the soil from which all of us, every last person, either blossom or wither. We each have need of food, clothing, education, medical care, and companionship; but first, we must have a place to live and grow.
Everything a detainee says is classified. Detainees cannot talk to you. They cannot talk to anyone. They cannot challenge, in a meaningful way, their detention. All that is left is for people who survived Guantanamo Bay to speak for people who are left behind, and speak for those who are in so many Guantanamos, plural, in my part of the world.
Women's rights are human rights.
Women's rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.
All that I can tell you is, that I used my humble powers to the uttermost, and raised my voice in behalf of Human Rights in general, and the elevation and Rights of Woman in particular, nearly all my life.
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