Using All the Tools at Our Disposal: Poverty Reduction and the Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health

For the most part, development practitioners fail to use the human rights tools at their disposal in the struggle against poverty. Of course, neither human rights nor anything else provide a magic solution to the immensely complex problem of global poverty. Nonetheless, human rights have a constructive contribution to make and a failure to use them is a missed opportunity of major proportions. There has been some progress at the policy level, much less progress at the operational level.