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Abstract
The framework of "LGBT rights" can be critiqued as challenging tradition or as culturally specific, yet at the same time, it can be essential to one's sense of identity and justice.  Where can the discourse of "public health" help overcome barriers for LGBT people, both within the right to health and beyond? What are the limits to using public health to talk about human rights, LGBT or otherwise?  What are the dangers of conflating these distinct areas of concern?  We will explore these questions and focus on how academics and activists can most effectively navigate challenges to benefit both public health and LGBT rights.

Jessica Stern is the Executive Director of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. As the first researcher on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights at Human Rights Watch, she conducted fact-finding investigations and advocacy around sexual orientation and gender identity in countries including Iran, Kyrgyzstan, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. As a Ralph Bunche Fellow at Amnesty International, she documented police brutality for what became its landmark report on police brutality in LGBT communities in the U.S., “Stonewalled.” She was a founding collective member and co-coordinator of Bluestockings, then New York’s only women’s bookstore. She has campaigned extensively for women’s rights, LGBT rights, and economic justice with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Control Ciudadano, the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, and the Urban Justice Center. She holds a masters degree in human rights from the London School of Economics. She is frequently quoted in the Mail & Guardian, Al Jazeera English, the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France Presse, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America, The Guardian and The BBC.

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Jessica Stern Executive Director Speaker International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission
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Hon.Agnes Binagwaho has served as Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health in Rwanda since October 2008. She specialized in emergency pediatrics, neonatology, and the treatment of HIV/AIDS; and she chairs the Rwandan Pediatric Society. From 1986 to 2002, she practiced medicine in public hospitals in Rwanda and several other countries before joining Rwanda's National AIDS Control Commission as Executive Secretary. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Public Library of Science, and the Harvard University Health and Human Rights Journal. Dr. Binagwaho co‐chaired the Millennium Development Goal Project Task Force on HIV/AIDS and Access to Essential Medicines for the Secretary‐General of the United Nations under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Sachs. She was the global co‐chair of the Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS. In addition to her medical degree and Master in Peadiatry, she received an Honorary Doctor of Sciences from Dartmouth College. Dr. Binagwaho serves as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine of Harvard Medical School.

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Hon. Agnes Binagwaho Minister of Health Speaker Rwanda
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Zainab Hawa Bangura of Sierra Leone is Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict at the level of Under-Secretary-General at the United Nations.

Prior to this appointment, Ms. Bangura was the Minister of Health and Sanitation for the Government of Sierra Leone, and brings to the position over 20 years of policy, diplomatic and practical experience in the field of governance, conflict resolution and reconciliation in Africa. She was previously the second female Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, including Chief Adviser and Spokesperson of the President on bilateral and international issues. Ms. Bangura has been instrumental in developing national programmes on affordable health, advocating for the elimination of genital mutilation, managing the country’s Peace Building Commission and contributing to the multilateral and bilateral relations with the international community. She is experienced in meeting with interlocutors in diverse situations, including rebel groups, and familiar in dealing with State and non-State actors relevant to issues of sexual violence while fighting corruption and impunity.

Ms. Bangura has on-the-ground experience with peacekeeping operations from within the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), where she was responsible for the management of the largest civilian component of the Mission, including promoting capacity-building of government institutions and community reconciliation. She is an experienced results-driven civil society, human and women’s rights campaigner and democracy activist, notably as Executive Director of the National Accountability Groups, Chair and Co-founder of the Movement for Progress Party of Sierra Leone, as well as Coordinator and Co-founder of the Campaign for Good Governance.

Ms. Bangura is a former fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute of London, possessing Diplomas in Insurance Management from the City University Business School of London and Nottingham University. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.

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Zainab Bangura United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Speaker
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Abstract
The scope and complexity of global health can be overwhelming, making it difficult to form an inspiring and unified vision for the future. Mired in this complexity, the international community defines success disease by disease‹without a clear picture of what fundamental reform would actually look like. If the aspiration of global health with justice is the right goal, then answering three simple questions may pierce the haze.

First, what would global health look like? That is, given optimal priority-setting, funding, and implementation, to what level of health should we aspire, and with what provision of health-related services? Posing these three elementary questions, of course, oversimplifies a field that is fraught with tensions and trade offs. But I want to imagine a more ideal future for world health, with bold proposals to get there. After thinking about these three basic questions, I turn to an idea for innovative global governance for health‹a Framework Convention on Global Health.

Second, what would global health with justice look like? Global health seeks to improve all the major indicators of health, such as infant and maternal mortality and longevity. Global health with justice, however, requires that we look beyond improved health outcomes for the population as a whole. Although overall population health is vitally important, justice requires a significant reduction in health disparities between the well-off and the poor. Societies that achieve high levels of health and longevity for most, while the poor and marginalized die young, do not comport with social justice.

Third, what would it take to achieve global health with justice? That is, once we clearly state the goal, and meaning, of global health with justice, what concrete steps are required to reach this ambitious objective? This raises fundamental challenges, intellectually and operationally, as the response cannot be limited to ever-greater resources, but must also involve improved governance‹at the country and international level and across multiple sectors.

Lawrence O. Gostin is University Professor, Georgetown University’s highest academic rank conferred by the University President. Prof. Gostin directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and was the Founding O’Neill Chair in Global Health Law. He served as Associate Dean for Research at Georgetown Law from 2004 to 2008. He is Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University, Professor of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the Center for Law & the Public’s Health at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities.

 Prof. Gostin holds a number of international academic professorial appointments: Visiting Professor (Faculty of Medical Sciences) and Research Fellow (Centre for Socio-Legal Studies) at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom; the Claude Leon Foundation Distinguished Scholar and Visiting Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; and the Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellow and Founding Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies (Trinity College), University of Melbourne. Prof. Gostin serves as Secretary and a member of the Governing Board of Directors of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health.

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Lawrence O. Gostin O'Neill Professor in Global Health Law Speaker Georgetown University
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Abstract:
The peoples of Burma/Myanmar have faced military rule, human rights violations, and poor health outcomes for decades. The country Is now undergoing a political liberalization, and multiple changes in political, social and economic life. The human rights and health situation of the country's many ethnic nationalities remain challenging, and represent one of the clearest threats to the prospect of successful transition to peace, and to democracy. We will explore the current health and human rights situation in the country, the ongoing threats to peace, and ways forward for this least developed nation as it emerges from 5 decades of military rule.

Chris Beyrer MD, MPH, is a professor of Epidemiology, International Health, and Health, Behavior, and Society at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is the founding Director of the University¹s Center for Public Health and Human Rights, which seeks to bring the tools of population-based sciences to bear on Health and rights threats. Dr. Beyrer also serves as Associate Director of the Johns Hopkins Centers for AIDS Research (CFAR) and of the Center for Global Health. He has been involved in health and human rights work with Burmese populations since 1993. Prof. Beyrer is the author of more than 200 scientific papers, and author or editor of six books, including War in the Blood: Sex, Politics and AIDS in Southeast Asia, and Public Health and Human Rights: Evidence-Based Approaches. He has served as a consultant and adviser to numerous national and international institutions, including the National Institutes of Health, the World Bank, WHO, UNAIDS, the Open Society Foundations, the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, amfAR The Foundation for AIDS Research, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. Dr. Beyrer received a BA in History from Hobart and Wm. Smith Colleges, his MD from SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn, NY, and completed his residency in Preventive Medicine, public health training, an MPH and a Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He received an honorary Doctorate (PhD) in Health Sciences from Chiang Mai University in Thailand, in 2012, in recognition of his 20 years of public health service in Thailand

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Chris Beyrer Director Speaker Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health & Human Rights
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**** PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF SPEAKER***

Dr. Susan Kasedde currently serves as Senior Advisor and Team Leader on HIV and Adolescents for UNICEF based in New York since November 2009. In this role, she has contributed towards global level evidence generation, technical guidance development, advocacy, global partnership development, and technical assistance towards the global response towards HIV prevention, treatment and care in adolescents aged 10 - 19. Since 2011, on behalf of UNICEF, Susan has coordinated a series of efforts including documentation of global practices in the care of adolescents living with HIV; mathematical modeling with the Futures Institute to assess the impact and cost of scale up of proven high impact HIV prevention, treatment and care interventions within a holistic response, on new HIV infections and AIDS deaths in adolescents; and a systematic review with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to confirm evidence on effective approaches for programming to reduce HIV infection, illness and death in adolescents. This work has contributed to stronger advocacy and technical guidelines for programming for adolescents, a group of children previously largely neglected. In 2013, the documentation on adolescents living with HIV was a major contribution to the new WHO guidelines on HIV testing and counseling and care in adolescents. The impact modeling and systematic review are among a series of key papers that will be released in a special supplement on HIV prevention, treatment and care in adolescents at the International AIDS Society Conference in Melbourne, Australia in 2014.

 

 Susan joined UNICEF having served since 2007 as Regional Adviser with the UNAIDS Regional Office for Eastern & Southern Africa. In that role, she was responsible for coordinating analytic work on the epidemic and response and modes of HIV transmission in several high HIV burden countries, working extensively with government teams and partners in the highest HIV burden countries in the world to use an incidence model to predict the next 1000 new HIV infections and assess alignment of national strategies with the national epidemic. Susan has over 18 years of experience working on adolescents sexual and reproductive health of which 16 of those have been focused on HIV in adolescents. Susan holds a doctorate in Epidemiology and Population Health from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, a Masters degree in Public Health from Boston University and Bachelors degrees in Biomedical Science and French. Susan is a national of Uganda and speaks English and French.

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Susan Kasedde Senior Advisor and Team Leader on HIV and Adolescents Speaker UNICEF
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Abstract
According to international human rights law, countries have to provide palliative care and pain treatment medications as part of their core obligations under the right to health. The failure to take reasonable steps to ensure that people who suffer pain have access to adequate pain treatment may also result in the violation of the obligation to protect against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The lecture will discuss Human Rights Watch’s research on this issue in India, Ukraine, Senegal, Kenya, and Mexico; our national and international advocacy efforts; and how we evaluate the impact of our work.

Joe Amon, PhD MSPH, is the Director of the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. Since joining Human Rights Watch in 2005, Joe has worked on a wide range of issues including access to medicines; discrimination, arbitrary detention and torture in health settings; censorship and the denial of health information; and the role of civil society in the response to infectious disease outbreaks and environmental health threats. Between January 2009 and June 2013 he oversaw Human Rights Watch's work on disability rights. He is an associate in the department of epidemiology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University. In 2012 he was a distinguished visiting lecturer at the Paris School of International Affairs of SciencesPo.            

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Joe Amon Director of Health and Human Rights Speaker Human Rights Watch
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Abstract
Preventing tobacco addiction is one of the leading ways to prevent fatal disease, yet many nations have declined to take steps against it. In recent years an international legal effort has begun to fill this void. In this lecture Professor Koh, formerly Legal Adviser of the U.S. State Department, will review the various dimensions of the legal campaign that is now underway.

Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale Law School in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.

Professor Koh is one of the country’s leading experts in public and private international law, national security law, and human rights. He first began teaching at Yale Law School in 1985 and served as its fifteenth Dean from 2004 until 2009. From 2009 to 2013, he took leave as the Martin R. Flug ’55 Professor of International Law to join the State Department as Legal Adviser, service for which he received the Secretary of State's Distinguished Service Award. From 1993 to 2009, he was the Gerard C. & Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law at Yale Law School, and from 1998 to 2001, he served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

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Harold Hongju Koh Sterling Professor of International Law Speaker Yale Law School
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Abstract
The most important post-Nuremberg health-related human right and bioethics principle is informed consent. A series of post-9/11 developments, including quarantine and forced vaccination proposals, "altered standards of care" for disaster responders, eliminating consent for "emergency research," the post-ACA rise of "standard of care research," whole genome screening guidelines for adults and children, and proposals for newborns, gene bank proposals for "broad" or no consent, and the force-feeding of hunger strikers at Guantanamo and in US prisons, all suggest that informed consent should be seen as optional, and judged by a physician-determined standard of care. It's time to kill these zombies, and save the life of informed consent, and thus of the individual person who retains dignity and human rights.

George Annas is the cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, a transnational professional association of lawyers and physicians working together to promote human rights and health.  He has degrees from Harvard College (A.B. economics, '67), Harvard Law School (J.D. '70) and Harvard School of Public Health (M.P.H. '72).

Professor Annas is the author or editor of 18 books on health law and bioethics, including Worst Case Bioethics:  Death, Disaster, and Public Health(2010),Public Health Law (2007),American Bioethics: Crossing Human Rights and Health Law Boundaries(2005),The Rights of Patients(3d ed. 2004),Some Choice: Law, Medicine, and theMarket (1999), Standard of Care: The Law of American Bioethics (l993), and Judging Medicine (1987), and a play entitled Shelley's Brain, that has been presented to bioethics audiences across the U.S. and in Australia. Professor Annas wrote a regular feature on "law and bioethics" for the Hastings Center Report from 1976 to 199l, and a regular feature on "Public Health and the Law" in the American Journal of Public Health from 1982 to 1992 and since 1991 has written a regular feature for the NewEngland Journal of Medicine (“Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights”).

He  is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Institute of Medicine, a member of the National Academies’ Human Rights Committee, and co-chair of the American Bar Association's Committee on Health Rights and Bioethics (Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section). He has also held a variety of government regulatory posts, including Vice Chair of the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine, Chair of the Massachusetts Health Facilities Appeals Board, and Chair of the Massachusetts Organ Transplant Task Force.

 

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George J. Annas, JD, MPH Professor Speaker Boston University Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Law
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Abstract:

This paper estimates the effect that successful cocaine interdiction policies in Colombia have had on violence in Mexico. We propose a simple model of the war on drugs that captures the essence of our identification strategy: aggregate supply shocks affect the size of illegal drug markets, which then increases or decreases violence. We estimate the effect of the interaction of cocaine seizures in Colombia with simple geographic features of Mexican municipalities. Our results indicate that aggregate supply shocks originated in drug seizures in Colombia affect homicides in Mexico. The effects are especially large for violence generated by clashes between drug cartels. Our estimates also show that government crackdowns on drug cartels might not be the only explanation behind the rise of illegal drug trafficking and violence observed in the last six years in Mexico: successful interdiction policies implemented in Colombia since 2006 have also played a major role in the worsening of the Mexican situationduring Calderon's sexennium.

 

Speaker Bio:

Daniel Mejia is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Director of the Research Center on Drugs and Security (CESED) at Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, where he has taught since 2006. He received a BA and MA in Economics from Universidad de los Andes and a MA and PhD in economics from Brown University. Prior to joining Universidad de los Andes he worked as a researcher at the Central Bank of Colombia and Fedesarrollo. Daniel he has been actively involved in a research agenda whose main objective is to provide an independent, economic evaluation of anti-drug policies implemented under Plan Colombia. His academic work has been published at the Journal of Development Economics, the European Journal of Political Economy, Economics of Governance and Economia: Journal of the Latin America Economic Association. In 2008 he was awarded Fedesarrollos´s German Botero de los Ríos prize for economic research. Also, in 2008, 2010 and 2012 he was awarded with research grants from the Open Society Institute for the study of anti-drug policies in Colombia. Daniel, together with Alejandro Gaviria, recently published the book “Políticas antidroga en Colombia: éxitos, fracasos y extravíos” (Anti-drug policies in Colombia: successes, failures and lost opportunities) at Universidad de los Andes, in Bogota. Between 2011 and 2012, Daniel was a member of the Advisory Commission on Criminal Policy and more recently he is the Chair of the Colombian Government´s Advisory Commission on Drugs Policy.

 

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Daniel Mejia Londoño Associate Professor in the Department of Economics and Director of the Research Center on Drugs and Security (CESED) Speaker Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia
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