Page 32 - Human Rights

Faculty of Nursing
Adult care Nursing Department

• to protect: to ensure others do not interfere, primarily through effective regulation and

remedies, and • to fulfil: including to promote rights, facilitate access to rights, and provide for

those unable to provide for themselves

The obligation to respect human rights requires states to refrain from interfering directly or
indirectly with people’s enjoyment of human rights.

This is an immediate obligation.

To protect human rights, states must prevent, investigate, punish and ensure redress for the harm

caused by abuses of human rights by third parties – private individuals, commercial enterprises or
other non-state actors. This is an immediate obligation.

States have an obligation to fulfil human rights by taking legislative, administrative, budgetary,

judicial and other steps towards the full realization of human rights.

As many aspects are resource-dependent, international standards recognize that this obligation
may be realized progressively.

Governments must give immediate priority to meeting the minimum essential levels of each right,

especially for the most vulnerable.

Increasingly included in the evaluation of health rights is the extent of participation in policy
formulation and care delivery.

General Comment 14 of the CESR on the right to health notes that a “further important aspect is

the improvement and furtherance of participation of the population in the provision of preventive

and curative health services … and, in particular, participation in political decisions relating to the
right to health taken at both the community and national levels”.

The Comment further states that:

29 Academic Year 2025/2026