Legal nature of health in latin america and caribean: a compared constitucional study

Abstract

Based on the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005) that states that health is a fundamental human right, this study aims at investigating how health is expressed in the Constitutions of different regions on Latin America and Caribean. In this research, the description of each constitution is analysed and a comparison is performed. This works concludes that: a) health concept is mainly based on World Health Organization - WHO (1946) description; b) the great majority of the studied countries states that health is indeed a human right and is a duty of the State; c) some countries considered it as an individual duty and others as a public property.