President Ferenc Mádl, Health and Human Rights in the European Union

• Jurisdiction: European Union
• Citation: Vol. 22 No. 1
• Publication year: 2008
• topic: Health Law

HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

President Ferenc Mádl^*

My presentation is on the health of women and men according to the human rights requirements of the European Union. Before starting this presentation, let me refer to the fact that much hard work was needed to transform the hatred-ridden, war-ridden European nations into one political entity of cooperation, solidarity, and peace, so that we can now discuss as one issue, under one roof, these three elements of my presentation: women and men, human rights, and the European Union.

I shall discuss four issues: first, health policy considerations and the health status of men and women in the European Union; second, human rights requirements as regards the protection of health and the health care of men and women in the European Union; third, the major forms of health care required by the human rights requirements; and fourth, who pays the bill, and how should the costs of those activities that health processes really demand be allocated?

Let me start by saying that health status has generally improved in recent decades in the European Union in most disease categories, except for cancer and cardiac diseases.¹Life expectancy has also increased substantially, especially that of women.²Infant mortality has gone down dramatically.³

However, fertility, though slightly increasing in the latest decades, is still under the level of replacement, meaning 2.1 children per woman.⁴This also means that the population of the European countries is decreasing.

Society is aging, which is a very important health policy consideration with many consequences, not least of which is that fewer and fewer active people must support retired or elderly members of the population. For various reasons, health costs are increasing dramatically, and society will be forced to spend more on the health of the population. These are perhaps the most interesting and most dramatic conclusions from the first part of my analysis concerning health status and health policy considerations.

The second issue is the human rights requirements as far as the protection of health and health care of men and women in Europe are concerned. These human rights requirements are spelled out partly by the member-state constitutions and partly by European Community law.

Let me refer briefly to the fact that as far as the constitutions are concerned, all the European member-states' constitutions have human rights chapters.⁵

One of the major dispositions concerning the topic of our conference is that these constitutions order equal treatment with regard to sex and nationality of women and men in the European Union.⁶

As far as Community law is concerned, health was like education, like culture, like social policy: at the beginning, it was not meant to be a concern of European integration or a matter of European Union competence.⁷These only became a European concern in the later stage of the development of the integration process. However, before the establishment of the European Community in 1950, the Council of Europe, with the participation of the European states, made a very important convention, the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.⁸This was the first comprehensive human rights convention binding on those states.⁹

When it came about in 1957, the European Union did not adhere to this Convention. However, it became part of the European Union's legal order by European Community decisions and court practice. In 2000, the Charter of Fundamental Rights was passed in Nice with very detailed provisions on all kinds of human rights...