LAC Main Seminar Series: Local Maladies, Global Remedies: The Trajectories of the Right to Health in Brazil and Colombia
Convener: David Doyle, University of Oxford
Speaker: Everaldo Lamprea, Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Everaldo Lamprea is a Colombian scholar who has researched and written on the right to health and access to healthcare in Latin America and the global south. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University. Previously, he was a research fellow in residence at Harvard's human rights program. Currently, he is a professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. His most recent book, Local Maladies, Global Remedies: Reclaiming the Right to Health in Latin America (Edward Elgar Pub, 2022) summarizes his research agenda during the past decade.
In this presentation I will discuss the cases of Colombia and Brazil, the two most litigious countries–when it comes to basic and socioeconomic rights—in Latin America. I will present three different periods in the development of the right to health in both south American countries: (i) a first moment of emergence of the right to health in Brazil's 1988 and Colombias´1991 Constitution, bolstered by the pathbreaking HIV/AIDS rulings handed down by the Brazilian Supreme Court and by the Colombian Constitutional Court; (ii) a second moment of "pharmaceuticalization" of the right to the health, starting in the early 2000s, when litigants marshalled the right to health in order to demand--from their health systems--expensive biotech drugs used for the treatment of chronic diseases such as cancer; (iii) the current post-pandemic moment, when scholars, judges, litigants and policymakers are rethinking the right to health against the backdrop of the hegemoic power of Big Pharma companies. I will close my presentation by discussing the health system reform proposed by the Petro administration, an overarching policy that has ingnited a heated debate in Colombia and that is based--according to the government--on a robust notion of the right to health that is opposed to a neoliberal, privatizing provision of health-care.
