Seminar 6

Wednesday 12th March 2008

Speaker: Prof Eileen O’Keefe, London Metropolitan University

Responder: Prof Paul Hunt, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Health, University of Essex

Chair: Prof John Gabriel, Head of Dept. of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University

A standard move to promote human rights is to highlight legal obligations and to "name and shame" duty bearers which fail to meet these obligations. An emerging addition to the toolkit has been the development of Impact Assessment packages, which provide a framework to enable stakeholders to identify positively the steps they need to take to meet their obligations. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a strategy for assessing potential consequences for health of programmes, policies and projects at the planning stage with the objective of reducing negative and increasing positive consequences for health. HIA is used in several countries, the EU, the World Bank, the Greater London Assembly. The seminar discussed the recent attempts to include human rights considerations in Health Impact Assessment".

Audio Recording: Introduction