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Acknowledging the global effort being made to address the health workforce crisis, and the considerable volume of literature on this topic, the Special Rapporteur’s report will emphasize broader, systemic, and structural issues that have an impact on medical education systems. The Special Rapporteur wishes to promote more democratic, human rights-based medical education systems that enable States to make healthcare available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality for all. The Special Rapporteur is concerned that low- or middle-income countries should not replicate medical education systems that are founded on simplistic biomedical models and non-democratic hierarchical systems. In his request for contributions and feedback, the Special Rapporteur seeks examples of medical education undergoing change from more hierarchical to more democratic, rights-based and community-based models.

Understanding human rights in practice requires looking at the way the ideas they promote have become part of everyday life for many people around the world. Human Rights Transformation in Practice brings together scholars from various disciplines in order to broaden and deepen our understanding of how these ideas about human rights travel and how they are translated and transformed along the way. It challenges the idea that human rights are an entirely Western construct resisted by the postcolonial world by showing how these ideas are appropriated around the world and how the international human rights norms and architecture are shaped by different countries’ experiences. By examining the human rights system as a social justice ideology with universal aspirations, flexible enough to be reinterpreted and redefined in a variety of contexts and for a broad range of problems, it is possible to develop a more comprehensive and useful understanding of the way human rights work in our contemporary world.

Global leadership is needed urgently to catalyse long-term solutions that prompt governments to take regulatory action, hold the pharmaceutical industry to account for its human rights responsibilities, and to fulfil everyone’s right to the highest attainable standard of health. Moreover, the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines, formulated by former Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Paul Hunt, implore the pharmaceutical industry to “consider all the arrangements at its disposal with a view to ensuring that medicines are affordable to as many people as possible”. Curiously, the recent reports of the UN High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines and the first WHO Fair Pricing Forum emphasised neither the pharmaceutical industry’s human rights responsibilities towards medicines affordability nor enforcement mechanisms. Katrina Perehudoff is a post doctoral research fellow at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, and a post doctoral researcher at the International Centre for Reproductive Health, Department of Public Health & Primary Care, Ghent University in Belgium.

New Zealand is a known advocate and defender of human rights, with a strong ethos of fairness, manifest in a public health system, public education system, lack of corruption, and transparent, accessible politicians. In the wake of the tragedy it has emerged that for years the Human Rights Commission had been working with the Muslim community in New Zealand to help draw attention to their experience of hatred and abuse. One of the Muslim leaders, Anjum Rahman of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, has spoken of her efforts to alert the previous and current governments of the threats and increasing vitriol: “We warned you. The New Zealand Chief Human Rights Commissioner, and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Paul Hunt, is in Christchurch with the Muslim community, and he acknowledges the Islamophobia in some quarters in New Zealand.