The justiciability of the right to health in the inter-american court of human rights: A brief jurisprudential analysis

Abstract

Considering the international protection of human rights, and due to the lack of express protection of economic, social, cultural and environmental rights by the American Convention on Human Rights - which provides in its article 26 only a progressive protection of these rights -, we intend to study some aspects about the justiciability of the right to health before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, observing the position of its jurisprudence regarding the protection of this right. It uses the deductive method and the technique of bibliographic and jurisprudential research to answer the following problem: what is the position of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on the protection and justiciability of the right to health? In the end, it is observed that the system of protection of the American Convention on Human Rights, as a rule, does not allow the justiciability of the right to health before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which, initially, safeguards the respective right indirectly through civil and political rights, starting in 2018 to recognize their direct and autonomous justiciability by means of Article 26 of the American Convention on Human Rights. The importance of this work lies in the fact of understanding how the protection of collective rights takes place at an international level, which directly reflects on the domestic law of States, configuring a multilevel protection of rights.