Conference on the right to health: Ms. Bouayach stressed on the urgent need to bridge the gap between the legal texts enacting rights and their effective enjoyment in reality

At the opening session of the launching conference of the project on “The effectiveness of the right to health in Morocco: Towards a health system based on a human rights approach”, Ms. Amina Bouayach, Chairperson of the National Human Right Council (CNDH), called for the necessity to go beyond the vision that considers health as a social sector in the traditional sense, and to manage it as an investment in people and the future".

In this context, the CNDH President affirmed that the evolution of the human rights system and its constitutional enshrinement in our country has resulted in an advanced legal arsenal that is open for development and improvement. However, several obstacles and difficulties still prevent this legal arsenal from being implemented and turned into guarantees for the effective enjoyment of these rights by citizens.

From this perspective, the strategy of the effectiveness of rights is, in fact, one of the manifestations of a systematic and necessary evolution for exercising the constitutional duties of the CNDH. This evolution is imposed by the urgent need to bridge the gap between the legal texts enacting rights and their effective enjoyment in reality.

Regarding the importance of approaching the right to health from the effectiveness perspective, Ms. Bouayach stressed that the effectiveness of rights aims, in the first place, to enhance the possibilities for optimal application of the legal and human rights arsenal. Within this context, if the right to health is guaranteed to all Moroccans under the provisions of the constitution and laws, the application of these laws remains in many cases dependent on economic, social, and management factors that often prevent groups from benefiting from these rights.

Concerning the methodology of the implementation of this project, Ms. Bouayach said, that the CNDH believes that addressing human rights issues in general, and economic and social rights in particular, requires more than ever to be courageous enough to propose creative and innovative solutions. This later intends to adopt an approach based on three pillars :

1-The first one is the necessity to build on the basis of the accumulation of ideas and programs of various parties involved in the process of benefiting from the right to health in its multiple levels.

2-The second is based on mobilizing the collective intelligence of all our partners in this project, who are directly or indirectly involved in the right to health. Therefore, we chose to adopt a participatory and open approach to all. The invitation will remain open to everyone who could have the possibility to contribute to this human rights workshop’s success.

3-As for the third pillar, it is manifested in the proximity policy and the adoption of an emerging approach, which will be interpreted in regional meetings that we will organize as part of the implementation of this project.