Global health policy expert Benjamin Mason Meier, JD, LLM, PhD, joins UNC faculty
Benjamin Mason Meier, JD, PhDWhen Ben Meier was an undergraduate biochemistry major at Cornell University, he realized something: while the solutions to global health problems were being advanced by science—applying biotechnology to revolutionize health and nutrition—the implementation of those solutions was being impeded by global policy. “So I ventured away from science and sought to understand policy,” Meier said.
Thus began an educational journey that would explore international health law, human rights theory and global public health.
Meier went on to get a law degree from Cornell Law School, a Master of Law in international and comparative law from Cornell and the Sorbonne, and a doctorate in sociomedical sciences from Columbia. Through the initiative of the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, he is joining the UNC faculty as assistant professor of global health policy in the Department of Public Policy and an adjunct assistant professor in the Gillings School of Global Public Health.
Working at the intersection of public health and human rights, Meier’s research examines global policy for a human “right to health.” The right to health “has always been difficult for human rights attorneys,” Meier says. This right necessitates that governments take positive steps to realize healthy conditions. While advocates have recently rallied around a right of access to HIV treatment, these human rights advocates have been hard pressed to move beyond medications and address other well-established determinants of health.
Since states recognized a right to health in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, codified in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as “the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health,” there has been neither an examination of the origin of this right nor a debate about how the concept has changed over time. Meier’s dissertation addresses this gap.
In doing so, he finds that the right to health has evolved as a right to curative medicines—in other words, a right to health care—moving away from preventive care and social determinants of health. “I find that our public health imperatives have become disconnected from the obligations of human rights,” Meier says. His scholarship seeks to find ways of reforming human rights law to reflect these public health understandings.
Meier has acquired a wide variety of experiences in health and human rights. After working at the U.S. Department of Justice and the World Health Organization, he served for three years as the public health law manager at Columbia University’s Center for Health Policy.
While completing his studies at Columbia, Meier held fellowships at the Legacy Foundation and with the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, where he worked with notable economist Joseph Stiglitz. He was also a scholar at Georgetown Law School’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. In addition to publishing a series of articles in legal journals, his work has appeared in the American Journal of Law and Medicine, Yale Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law and American Journal of Public Health.
As a result, Meier has a developed a broad perspective on global health policy issues. Human rights must be realized “through an international commitment at a truly global level,” he says.
This will call for an interdisciplinary, comprehensive approach to global health governance,and this is precisely the approach Meier intends to take at UNC. “My hope is to create connections between public health, law and public policy that will benefit the educational missions of all three disciplines,” Meier says, “and to form research collaborations that can improve global health policy scholarship and practice.”
- Story by Lisa Chensvold
Copyright © 2008 Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases