Peru’s mental health system remains marked by chronic underinvestment, fragmentation, and weak regulation, leaving many without adequate access to care. In this context, private pharmacy chains have become central actors in the provision of mental health services, functioning as de facto points of access for psychotropic medications. Drawing on the concept of institutional corruption and a rights-based analysis, this paper examines how their dominance has transformed access to psychotropic medication into a market-controlled process in which commercial interests shape treatment pathways, reinforcing inequality and overmedicalization and undermining the right to health.

Discriminatory laws and punitive policing practices have long been known to impede access to HIV and other health services. While the 2021–2026 Global AIDS Strategy calls for decriminalizing laws targeting key and vulnerable populations, progress toward this goal has largely stalled. To better understand the potential for working with police to ensure access to HIV services, we conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed and gray literature examining outcomes of police training published between January 2000 and August 2024. Following a review of 639 articles and reports meeting our search criteria, we found 11 peer-reviewed articles and six reports that included outcomes of police training. Our review found that well-designed police training can benefit both law enforcement and communities. It can be a cost-effective public health investment. Best practices for police training included addressing police occupational safety concerns; using trainings as opportunities to build stronger relationships between law enforcement and communities; fostering support from police leadership; and embedding training in a broader effort to change policing. While changing police is complex, our review found a body of literature describing positive outcomes from training, including increasing recognition by police of their role to protect the right to health for key and vulnerable populations.

Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) during conflicts and disasters are protected under multiple legal and policy frameworks; however, weak accountability mechanisms often prevent these rights from being realized. Drawing on case studies from Uganda, Bangladesh, and Nepal, this paper examines rights-based approaches for strengthening accountability for access to health services at the local level. The case studies adopt a “circle of accountability” as both a conceptual framework and implementation strategy to monitor, review, and prompt remedial action when reproductive rights are not respected. We argue that four interrelated strategies offer a promising approach to advance accountability for SRHR in displacement contexts marked by weakened governance, overlapping duty bearers, and power imbalances within humanitarian systems: (1) strategic legal and policy advocacy to promote alignment with human rights standards; (2) multi-sectoral partnerships and human rights champions to facilitate commitments among humanitarian actors; (3) equitable participation in humanitarian platforms to shape decision-making and remedial action; and (4) reimagined rights-based evaluation methods to promote people-centered accountability. Ultimately, we offer a road map for practitioners working in other humanitarian and disaster contexts to shift accountability for reproductive rights beyond performative checklists toward addressing both the immediate needs of displaced communities and systemic remedial action.

In this essay, I explore the link between energy access, especially electricity, and human rights, particularly the right to health in Nigeria. Despite its plentiful natural resources, including vast reserves of oil, gas, and sustainable bioenergy sources, Nigeria faces an energy crisis that constrains health care delivery, particularly in rural areas where health facilities lack reliable access to electricity. I analyze Nigeria's recently enacted Electricity Act, assessing its potential to address systemic energy challenges that hinder the realization of the right to health. I balance a doctrinal reading of the act with a rights-based analysis of its capacity to enhance equitable access to energy, recognizing electricity access as a social determinant of health. I further highlight the importance of policy and legal measures to alleviate Nigeria's energy crisis and improve health care access for millions disproportionately affected by the lack of clean and reliable energy. Crucially, the analysis also examines the governance and implementation gaps, such as regulatory coordination, that might prevent the act from ensuring energy is a tool to help fulfill the right to health.

The international legal landscape governing global health is characterized by regime complexity and legal fragmentation, with overlapping and sometimes conflicting legal norms. This fragmentation can blur lines of accountability, particularly in the context of access to medicines, where responsibility is dispersed across multiple stakeholders. Traditional frameworks of accountability in human rights law emphasize a vertical relationship between states as duty bearers and individuals as rights holders— failing to capture the multifaceted reality of global pharmaceutical governance, where access to medicines is shaped not only by the relevant state but also by a range of nonstate actors. Among these, pharmaceutical corporations play a pivotal role in shaping a state’s capabilities to ensure access to medicines for its population. In this context, we argue that the development and deployment of a pharmaceutical accountability scorecard offers an innovative tool to address some of the existing accountability gaps. This paper presents the Fair Pharma Scorecard – Cancer Edition, developed by the Dutch nonprofit Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation, as an innovative tool to address some of the existing gaps. Grounded in a normative framework that draws on various international legal and health- related instruments, this scorecard evaluates the extent to which multinational pharmaceutical companies fulfill or neglect their responsibilities to ensure equitable access to medicines.

In the last 15 years, coalitions of individuals and institutions worldwide have been calling for global policies to close the treatment gap for people living with mental disorders. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on the effects of the diffusion of these global mental health polices by exploring their implementation and impact in Peru. Aligned with the Movement for Global Mental Health, Peru has carried out a mental health reform aimed at scaling up mental health care in public facilities. Using the human rights-based framework of availability, accessibility, acceptability, and quality, this paper examines the reform's effects on a population prioritized by global and Peruvian policies: adolescents. The analysis, based on qualitative research, illustrates how the reform's overemphasis on scaling up access to pharmaceutical treatment neglects critical issues such as health system capacity, the availability of trained human resources, the need for intercultural approaches tailored to adolescents, and information systems that adequately monitor policy impact. The analysis also highlights how a reform that promotes pharmacological treatment creates risks of abuse by private actors involved in the marketing of psychiatric medications.

Accountability is central to human rights, yet it has varied interpretations across contexts. Conventionally, accountability denotes blame and punishment or emphasizes hierarchical relationships between claim holders and duty bearers. However, accountability cannot be an episodic event. In health governance, continuous and iterative improvements are required to reflect changing social, economic, and political circumstances. Accordingly, we define "temporal accountability" as an institutional design that incorporates time-bound obligations for implementing corrective actions and remedial measures. Through a case study of Taiwan's Constitutional Court decision on expatriate residents' financial contributions, we analyze temporal accountability in action and draw broader lessons for human rights accountability, proposing measurable indicators and guiding principles of temporal accountability.

This paper provides an overview of states' current obligations concerning key areas of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) under United Nations (UN) international human rights law. It emphasizes that SRHR are grounded in international treaties and acknowledged as fundamental human rights, and highlights the importance of their ongoing development. The analysis focuses on UN treaty body standards related to maternal health, contraceptive access, abortion, and sexuality education, while also identifying gaps in standards-particularly in areas such as menstrual health, assisted reproductive technologies, and self-care. Despite notable progress in the realization of SRHR, significant inequalities and rights violations persist, disproportionately affecting marginalized populations. The paper stresses the significance of these standards and advocates for their continuous evolution, emphasizing the need for greater consistency between human rights bodies and identifying areas where legal and policy development should be prioritized to ensure equitable and effective realization of SRHR for all.

This paper examines how people-centered accountability initiatives are operating to enforce the right to health amid Israel's genocide in Gaza. Drawing on a critical case study of Doctors Against Genocide, Healthcare Workers Watch, and the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, we situate these actors' work within international human rights law, social accountability scholarship, and decolonial and abolitionist critiques. We show how these actors are able to combine clinical documentation, survivor testimony, and direct action to monitor human rights violations, generate medically literate records of the harm inflicted, and press for remedies that state-centered mechanisms have failed to deliver despite findings of war crimes and genocide by United Nations bodies and human rights groups. Across these cases, we identify some common practices and tensions surrounding coalition-building, risks to documentation, navigating a media environment of mis/disinformation, and engaging strategically with institutions that often reproduce health harms or are directly complicit. We argue that these movements treat people-centered accountability as part of their professional duty and act on a mandate to prevent mass atrocity crimes rather than being silent. We conclude by outlining some practical implications for clinicians, professional associations, and health systems seeking to align their global health practice with a people-centered approach to accountability.