Dedication
Fall 1998 Human Rights Magazine
By Scott Burris
Jonathan M. Mann, whose article entitled "Public Health and Human Rights" appears in this issue of Human Rights, was a public health physician who made human rights a central part of his practice. As first chief of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) AIDS program, he taught the world that individual rights and the prevention of HIV were not antagonistic, but symbiotic. Because of Dr. Mann’s tenacious leadership, the global response to HIV has been founded on principles of nondiscrimination, privacy, and the empowerment of the oppressed and disenfranchised.
After leaving the WHO in 1990, Mann dedicated a considerable proportion of his vast energies to teaching public health officials, doctors, lawyers, and political leaders about the link between public health and human rights. As he explains here in what may be his last published article, the enjoyment of basic freedoms is one of the conditions required for people to be healthy. Self-determination, equality, freedom of speech, and other fundamental civil liberties make it possible for people to order their lives in a healthy way. And because racism, sexism, poverty, and all forms of oppression are major causes of illness, Mann saw public health as a social movement every bit as much as a professional, scientific discipline. He envisioned a global movement of health advocates to promote social justice and secure for everyone the conditions in which they could be healthy. Those who came to share his vision saw him as one of the movement’s natural leaders.
Dr. Mann died on September 2, 1998, at the age of fifty-one, in a plane crash off Nova Scotia. Those who knew him mourned the loss of a dynamic and visionary man who had the capacity, literally, to change the world for the better. We mourned him for the brilliant, witty, passionate person he was, but also for the sense of possibility he inspired in us. Those readers who are encountering Mann for the first time in this magazine will, I think, be struck by the strength of his vision, and will share the sense of loss.
Nothing will honor him better than our dedication in promoting the human rights that make health possible.
Scott Burris
Professor of Law, Temple University School of Law
As published in Human Rights, Fall 1998, Vol. 25, No. 4, p.3.
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