The Global Health Justice Partnership (GHJP), an initiative of the Yale Law School and Yale School of Public Health, was established in 2012 to promote interdisciplinary, innovative, and effective responses to key problems in health justice. It is a transformative collaboration integrating different fields in order to make critical policy interventions, develop new kinds of cross-cutting research, and provide educational opportunities straddling a variety of academic disciplines. Leveraging Yale’s institutional assets, the GHJP trains students to undertake collaborative, real-world research and advocacy to promote health justice in the U.S. and globally. It also builds partnerships with local NGOs and social movements in New Haven, the U.S., and around the world to move research and critical analyses into action; and nurtures a truly interdisciplinary brain trust dedicated to effecting social change.
Since its inception, the GHJP has hosted periodic conferences and events that explore the most pressing issues at the intersection of human rights, health, and social justice. These events, which are open to EMPH students, range from discussions on the HIV movement and organizing for the right to health with colleagues in India to panels exploring the legal causes of high drug prices in the United States. Watch the YSPH event listings for notices of upcoming events.
GHJP ongoing projects include:
- Pharma Justice - New pharmaceuticals and medical technologies are critically important to health. GHJP undertakes research and advocacy to ensure more integrity and transparency in clinical research and to bring about a more just system for the development and distribution of medicines.
- Gender, Sexuality, and Rights - Rights related to gender and sexuality face both incremental progress and significant rollbacks of support in health and legal policy. GHJP works in this complex and volatile area using a nuanced, multidisciplinary approach, moving between practice and scholarship to forge new alliances and provide analytics and groundwork for new policies. Most recently, the GHJP collaborated on a submission to explore the boundaries of ‘gender-based persecution’ under the International Criminal Court, and an amicus to the European Court of Human Rights supporting a challenge to testosterone-based gender regulations in sport for athletes with inter-sex conditions.
- Infectious Disease and Justice - Pathogens do not respect borders, and background conditions of inequality mean that certain people—particularly the poor — suffer the most when new health risks emerge. GHJP’s work in this area focuses on key structural factors associated with the transmission and effects of infectious disease, marshaling existing data, and doing new research to support public health and clinical interventions.
- Data for Health Justice - Global health justice issues are deeply entwined with disciplines that speak in numbers, in the epidemiological and clinical toll of diseases, and their economic costs. GHJP mobilizes a variety of disciplines from operations research and management science, epidemiology and mathematical modeling of disease, statistics, and probability to investigate ways to understand key issues in global health justice and their individual and societal impacts, and to shape solutions through modeling and assessing alternatives for interventions.
- Local Health Justice - Health inequity is as deeply rooted a problem in New Haven and in Connecticut, as it is across the United States, visible in everything from asthma rates to violence risk, to healthcare access. Because health status tracks other forms of exclusion and privilege, we work to improve health in marginalized communities as a means to build power that can have democratizing structural effects, with impacts that redound beyond health.
- Youth Equity Science/YES - The Youth Equity Science/YES Project is a collaboration between mental health and human rights experts to benefit lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth. YES’s aim is to promote LGBT youth equality, health, and well-being and decrease health and wellness disparities associated with stigma such as suicide, bullying, family non-acceptance, and HIV/AIDS. YES’s goal is to promote the use of evidence-based knowledge in conjunction with human rights principles of health justice and equality to address such disparities. YES interventions for health justice of LGBTQ youth include interrogation of the status of LGBTQ+ youth in child welfare services, and using a rights-based approach to end conversion practices globally.