The right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health is one of the fundamental human rights. However, in recent years, the situation in Belarus has significantly deteriorated. According to the National Human Rights Index, the score for the right to health declined from 5.7 out of 10 in 2019 to 4.2 out of 10 in 2024.
This report is devoted to the right to health and aims to promote a human rights–based approach to healthcare in Belarus. It was prepared jointly by the Belarusian Helsinki Committee and the Belarusian Medical Solidarity Foundation, which made it possible to develop a unified analytical framework in which international and national standards relating to the right to health are assessed through the lens of clinical expertise.
The research methodology includes desk-based analysis of the national regulatory framework, statistical data, and other publicly available sources, as well as relevant international instruments. For the first time, all recommendations of international mechanisms concerning the implementation of the right to health in the Republic of Belarus have been collected, analysed, and systematised within a single corpus. These include the legal positions and recommendations of the Human Rights Committee (HRC), the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), as well as recommendations issued under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the Voluntary National Review of the Sustainable Development Goals (VNR), and the special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council.
