Upcoming Special Sections
All issues include general papers in addition to Special Sections
We are currently calling for submissions to two sections:
1 A Viewpoint Series, “Fight for Rights” for immediate publication and considered for inclusion in June 2025
Viewpoints: Fight for Rights
In 2025, democracy, equity, human rights, and social justice are being challenged in countries around the world, including in the United States, and authoritarian regimes are increasing in number. Economic inequality is at its highest level since the neoliberal project began over 50 years ago, but authoritarian rulers threaten to remove the very structures that support the least well off, and to disregard evidence, science, and public health. Social media platforms provide malicious leaders – and their allies – with unchecked power to mislead and misinform the public, not only threatening health and other economic and social rights but creating division and mistrust across all of society.
HHR invites Viewpoints that highlight how attacks on a broad range of human rights threaten progress in achieving the right to the highest attainable standard of health.
In no more than 1500 words (including references) Viewpoints should identify specific threats to health rights (globally, nationally, or locally), focus on the various concerns of communities, and/or suggest ways of monitoring, measuring, and challenging these threats.
The selected Viewpoints will be published on the website throughout the next few months, and those received prior to 23 April will be considered for inclusion in our June issue, 2025.
Please email your submission as a Word document to: HHRSubmissions@hsph.harvard.edu
For further information, contact Carmel Williams, Executive Editor: williams@hsph.harvard.edu
Special Section, December 2025
Guest editors: Paul Hunt and Anuj Kapilashrami
Health and Human Rights is calling for papers that explore people-centred human rights accountability arrangements in healthcare and local, national, and global public health.
Accountability, a cardinal feature of human rights, is conventionally understood as:
the formal and informal processes, norms, and structures, particularly in a democratic system that demands power holders or people in authority account for their decisions and actions and remedy and failures in delivering their duties.1
Human rights accountability is especially pre-occupied with accountability for the rights and duties arising from human rights commitments.
States ratify human rights treaties, pass national human rights laws (legislature), implement them (executive), and adjudicate them (the judiciary). So, although human rights are meant to regulate states, states dominate human rights and their accountability.
UN treaty bodies, rapporteurs, national human rights institutions, and professionalised civil society organisations are independent mechanisms of accountability, but they are often aligned with the state-centred sphere.
There is also a critically important people-centred sphere of human rights, consisting of individuals, peoples, communities, and social movements. This sphere can not only critique initiatives, including accountability arrangements, in the state-centred sphere, it is also providing people-centred health-rights accountability platforms and processes.
In this call, Health and Human Rights is inviting high quality papers, (primary research articles, commentaries, case study-based papers, and viewpoints) that describe and/or evaluate different approaches to holding states and other duty-bearers to account for their human rights duties for healthcare and local, national, and global public health, including through:
- case studies of advocacy, activism, and community action that expose and address right to health violations, whether by the state, corporations, or other duty bearers
- the current and potential role of social movements to advance accountability for health-rights
- approaches to human rights accountability over the continuing health impacts of colonisation
- health-rights mechanisms holding accountable multilateral agencies (e.g. World Bank, WHO, UNDP, etc)
- national health regulators and inspectors
- examples of successful health-rights accountability campaigns that became institutionalized
- wider system-wide or community-level impacts (and unintended consequences) of specific accountability mechanisms.
Papers could also reflect on what accountability means and whether it has been influential and successful in holding states (and others) to account for their human rights obligations.
This special section reflects that human rights accountability is more than monitoring and evaluation. Rather it has three components:
1 Monitoring i.e. data collection, interviews, observation and so on, to find out what is happening.
2 Review i.e. assessing what’s happening against human rights standards and commitments. Review should include an independent element.
3 Remedial action i.e. when monitoring and review expose that human rights standards and commitments are not being respected, remedial action is needed to ensure the standards and commitments are kept.[2]
Submission details
Papers and perspective essays must be submitted by 20 July 2025
Full papers have a maximum word length of 7,000 words, including references.
We also invite Perspective Essays of up to 3000 words, including references, and Viewpoints of between 900-1500 words, including references, on any of these topics.
Authors are welcome to seek feedback on an abstract (no more than 250 words) before submitting the full paper
Please email your papers as Word documents to HHRSubmissions@hsph.harvard.edu
Questions about this special section can be directed to Carmel Williams, williams@hsph.harvard.edu
[1] A. Kapilashrami, N. Quinn, and A. Das, Advancing health rights and tackling inequalities: interrogating community development and participatory praxis, Policy Press, forthcoming.
[2] C. Williams and P. Hunt, “Neglecting human rights: accountability, data and Sustainable Development Goal 3”, The International Journal of Human Rights, 21/8, (2017) 1114-1143.