ABSTRACT
Protecting human worth and protecting human rights are not entirely analogous activities, but they do certainly heavily overlap. It is thus entirely apposite to consider the extent to which constraint of medical use has and could be achieved through human rights law and its enforcement. Since, medical use normally comes via the body, the central concern in this focus in the chapter is on the protection of rights in or related to the body, specifically from intentional intrusion. In many jurisdictions, this has a long tradition of being achieved through criminal and civil law as well as a typically somewhat more recent tradition of being protected via public law. In English law, for example, criminal law protections of the person from intentional harm (extending all the way up to homicide) have existed for thousands of years, whilst civil ones (trespass to the person) can be traced to at least early medieval times (see more specific discussion within Chapter 3) at which point public law ones also began to emerge, such as via the Magna Carta 1215. Over time the range of body related interests that exist has started to become better elucidated both in the general law and within public law more specifically at the domestic level. However, this chapter will focus largely on global and regional developments rather than domestic ones specifically, reflecting the fact that its aim is to address the macro question of how far human worth is generally being protected, rather than the more micro question of how it is being protected within individual jurisdictions. I will specifically argue that general and health specific human rights provisions at the global and regional levels are structured in such a way that the protection of human worth in the context of medical use is for the most part an imperative.
