Paul Hunt (academic)

Background

Hunt is a British and New Zealand national. For most of his formative years, he lived in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk (UK). In 1979, he graduated from Cambridge University (UK) with a law degree. In 1995, he was awarded a Masters of Jurisprudence (1st Class Hons) by the University of Waikato (New Zealand). In 2008, he was given an Honorary Doctorate by the Nordic School of Public Health. Since 2000, he has lived in Wivenhoe, Essex. In 1982, Hunt qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales. Between 1982-85, he worked for Kingsley Napley (London) as a civil and criminal litigation solicitor, and assistant to the Senior Partner, Sir David Napley, formerly President of the Law Society. During this period, Hunt was elected to the National Council of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Human rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, UK and Gambia

In 1985, Hunt left private practice and became a human rights lawyer in Israel/Palestine working for Quaker Peace and Service (now Quaker Peace and Social Witness). Between 1985-87, he lived in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and researched the Israeli Military Courts. Published in 1987, Justice? The Military Court System in the Israeli-Occupied Territories, examined the Military Courts through the ‘lens’ of Israel’s international human rights obligations.

On his return to the UK, Hunt worked with Sydney Bailey on an inter-denominational project about human rights in Britain and Ireland. The project included Mary Robinson, shortly to become the President of Ireland, and David Trimble, shortly to become leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and First Minister of Northern Ireland. The project led to Human Rights and Responsibilities in Britain and Ireland, edited by Bailey, and a shorter version, A Christian Perspective on Human Rights and Responsibilities: with Special Reference to Northern Ireland, edited by Hunt.

Between 1987-1990, Hunt worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties/Liberty (UK) as Legal Officer, Head of the Legal and Campaign Team and Acting General Secretary. He conducted national and international human rights cases, including litigation in Strasbourg under the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition to prisoners’ rights, he worked on the lawfulness of Northern Ireland’s emergency laws. and was responsible for one of the earliest publications in favour of incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law.

Between 1990-1992, Hunt was appointed Associate Director of the African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies (Gambia), working under Raymond Sock (formerly Solicitor-General) and Hassan Jallow (then Minister of Justice). The Centre paralleled and monitored the new Gambian-based African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights established under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. With Jallow, Hunt co-authored one of the first publications on HIV/AIDS and human rights in Africa, as well as research on African national human rights institutions, and children’s rights in the Gambia.

Academic career

Between 1992-2000, Hunt was senior lecturer at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. The focus of his teaching and research was national and international public law, especially human rights. He began to specialise in economic, social and cultural rights and his study, Reclaiming Social Rights: International and Comparative Perspectives, was published in 1996. This was one of the first books published on social rights. Reviewing it in the Human Rights Quarterly, Barbara Stark remarked upon the book’s ambition and concluded, “Hunt succeeds brilliantly” and that the study "dazzles".

At the University of Waikato, Hunt looked at human rights in New Zealand and the South Pacific, including the relationship between culture and rights, as well as the rights of indigenous peoples, which led to scholarship such as Culture, Rights and Cultural Rights: Perspectives from the South Pacific, co-edited with Margaret Wilson. Between 1996-97, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. In 2000, Hunt, Janet McLean, Bill Mansfield and Peter Cooper were commissioned by New Zealand’s Attorney-General to prepare an independent report on the country’s national human rights institutions. Many of their recommendations have been implemented by legislative and other reforms.

In 2000, Hunt was appointed Professor of Law at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex (UK), a position he still holds. At Essex, his teaching and research focus is national and international human rights, with a particular emphasis on economic, social and cultural rights, as well as human rights and development. He has served as Director of the Human Rights Centre and Chair of the Democratic Audit. Presently, he leads the health-rights work stream of the University’s Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council.

UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1999-2002)

In 1998, the New Zealand Government nominated Hunt to serve as an independent expert on the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva, and he was duly elected by States. He served as the Committee’s Rapporteur from 1999-2002. During this period, the Committee adopted several influential commentaries, known as General Comments, on economic, social and cultural rights, including on the right to adequate food, right to education, right to the highest attainable standard of health, and right to water. It also adopted some statements, including one on poverty and human rights, which broke new ground. These General Comments and statements have contributed to the growth of literature, and national and international initiatives, on economic, social and cultural rights since the turn of the century.

In light of the Committee’s statement on poverty, Mary Robinson, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, asked Hunt, Manfred Nowak and Siddiq Osmani to draft detailed and operational guidance on a human rights-based approach to poverty reduction. They responded by writing Human Rights and Poverty Reduction: A Conceptual Framework, followed by Draft Guidelines: A Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies, both of which were published by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). After a period of consultation, OHCHR revised the Draft Guidelines and they were published as Principles and Guidelines for a Human Rights Approach to Poverty Reduction Strategies.

UN Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of health (2002-2008)

In 2002, Hunt stepped down from the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and was appointed the first UN Special Rapporteur on the right to the highest attainable standard of health (‘right to health’). In this independent capacity, he reported, orally and in writing, to the UN General Assembly, UN Commission on Human Rights and UN Human Rights Council. He submitted thematic reports on a wide range of right to health issues, such as sexual and reproductive health, neglected diseases, mental disability, maternal mortality, and the health-rights responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies. He also visited, and wrote right to health reports on, countries, including India, Peru, Sweden, and Uganda. Hunt took the unorthodox step of undertaking visits to, and preparing right to health reports on, non-state actors, such as the World Trade Organisation, World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and GlaxoSmithKline. Also, he prepared reports with other Rapporteurs on Guantanamo Bay, as well as the Lebanon/Israel conflict of 2006. Many people wrote to Hunt with alleged violations of their right to health and he took up some of these complaints and subsequently reported to the UN about them.

His reports have elicited a wide response, for example, in 2005, Cynthia Rothschild discussed the report on sexual and reproductive health, “Hunt’s 2004 report is certainly one of the UN system’s most far-reaching documents to incorporate a focus on sexual orientation and gender identity and health”. Some commentators called the report “shocking” and Hunt was branded “unprofessional” in the UN Commission on Human Rights.

On maternal death and morbidity, Sandeep Prasad wrote, it “was [Hunt] who first started bringing the human rights dimensions of the issue of maternal mortality to the attention of the [UN Human Rights] Council as a global health and human rights crisis.” Following a press conference in Delhi at the end of his visit to India, during which he focussed on maternal mortality in Rajasthan and Maharashtra, the Indian Express devoted an editorial to the issue, reflected on Hunt’s findings, and agreed with his conclusion that “the situation does not befit a country of India’s stature and level of development.”

Following Hunt’s report on Peru, Ariel Frisancho Arroyo remarked upon “[t]he key role” played by Hunt in “supporting the health authorities’ interest on how to increase the realization of health-rights”. Following his report on Sweden, scholars wrote, “Since Hunt’s report and the resulting [Right to Health Care Initiative], most county councils have issued more generous guiding principles for the health care of local undocumented patients.” In an editorial, The Lancet commended Hunt’s thematic report on the health-rights responsibilities of pharmaceutical companies, as well as his twin report on GlaxoSmithKline. Hunt devoted three UN thematic reports to the methodological problem of how to measure the progressive realisation of the right to health and their influence is manifest in the key OHCHR publication Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation. He drew on several of his UN reports to co-author a major study on health systems and the right to health which was described by The Lancet and Wolff as a “landmark” report.

Human rights and the World Health Organisation

Hunt’s reports, such as his studies on Peru and Uganda, demonstrate constructive engagement with the World Health Organisation(WHO). In 2008, during his last oral report to the UN Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur, Hunt acknowledged this cooperation but also emphasised its limits: “Over the last six years, I have enjoyed excellent cooperation with a number of WHO members of staff on a range of policy and operational issues. For this, I am extremely grateful. However, to the best of my knowledge, neither the World Health Assembly, nor the WHO Executive Board, have ever considered one of my reports. Despite requests, I have never met a WHO Director General since my appointment in 2002.”

However, between 2011-2013, Hunt was appointed as a part-time Senior Human Rights Advisor to the Assistant Director-General, WHO, Flavia Bustreo, and he directed a project which researched whether there was evidence of impact of a human rights approach to health. This interdisciplinary and multi-author research concluded that applying human rights to women’s and children’s health policies and other interventions “not only helps governments comply with their binding national and international obligations, but also contributes to improving the health of women and children.” In 2015, Hunt co-edited a Special Issue of Harvard’s Health and Human Rights Journal which deepened analysis of this topic.

In September 2010, Hunt co-organised an international roundtable in Geneva on maternal mortality, human rights and accountability, and the proceedings were subsequently published. In this roundtable, and in a paper he presented at an international conference in Delhi during November 2010, Hunt began to analyse accountability as having three components: monitoring, review and remedy. This analysis was novel because, in the context of global health, accountability was usually understood as monitoring and evaluation, without the components of either independent review or remedy.

In 2010-11, Hunt sat on a Working Group of the UN Commission on Information and Accountability on Women’s and Children’s Health (COIA). The Working Group refined Hunt’s conception of accountability in its submission to COIA. In its final report, Keeping Promises, Measuring Results, COIA adopted this understanding of accountability. This conception of accountability shaped COIA’s recommendations to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and led to the Secretary-General establishing the independent Expert Review Group on Information and Accountability for Women’s and Children’s Health (iERG). The iERG sat from 2011-2015 and was succeeded by the Independent Accountability Panel which largely shares COIA’s and iERG’s understanding. In 2015, Julian Schweitzer wrote on the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that the COIA’s “definition of accountability - a cyclical process of monitoring, review, and action … - is now widely accepted in global health”.

After WHO

Hunt has recently turned his attention to social rights in the UK. In 2014-15, he sat on the statutory human rights inquiry into emergency health care established by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission. He has joined the Board of the National Health Service (NHS) England initiative, Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights, Inclusion and Empowerment (SHRINE). He has been appointed a Patron of Just Fair, a London-based think-tank on economic and social rights in the UK. With Ruth Lister, Baroness Lister of Burtersett he has written for the think-tank, Compass, on social rights in the UK.

Other

Hunt has provided expert testimony to the European Court of Human Rights, via the Centre for Reproductive Rights, and Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In 1999-2000, he sat on the Advisory Panel of the UNDP Human Development Report, Human Rights and Human Development. He was one of the drafters of, and signatories to, the Yokyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in 2006. In 2008, he co-founded the International Initiative on Maternal Mortality and Human Rights. Between 2009-2011, he sat on UNFPA’s External Advisory Panel. Hunt sits on the Editorial Boards of the Health and Human Rights Journal and International Journal on Human Rights and Drug Policy.

In 2008 Hunt was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Nordic School of Public Health.

In 2014, he gave a TEDx talk, Equality – the Road Less Travelled. He called for equality in health systems.

Main Publications

Reclaiming Social Rights: International and Comparative Perspectives (Dartmouth, 1996)

with Margaret Wilson (eds.) Culture, Rights and Cultural Rights: Perspectives from the South Pacific (Huia, 2000)

with Willem van Genugten and Susan Mathews (eds.), World Bank, IMF and Human Rights: Including The Tilburg Guiding Principles on World Bank, IMF and human rights (Nijmegen, 2003)

with Tony Gray (eds.), Maternal mortality, human rights and accountability (Routledge, 2013)