Legal Exploration of Right to Health

Abstract

The right to health is recognised as a fundamental human right in the World Health Organisation (WHO) Constitution. In Malaysia, the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health is a fundamental human right without discrimination for every human being. Consequently, the principle of the “right to health,” regardless of the legal status of an individual, is the driving force in creating acceptable standards of health care for all citizens. Even for individual who suffers from Covid-19, he still has a fundamental right to health. The issue of the right to health is whether the patients have any rights of their health? If they do have the right to health, the next issue is whether the hospitals are legally bound to follow such right, i.e. the right to health of the patients. Therefore, this paper aims to analyse and discuss the issues regarding the rights to health of the patients. Without the legal mechanism in recognising the right to health, it pointed out that is no such right. The method employed in this paper is qualitative based. The paper finds that although Malaysia does not have any specific legal framework about the right to health, the application of international legal mechanism can be referred to a guideline. Thus, it is important to have a specific legal framework by applying international legal mechanism in order to address this issue.