The Johannes Wier Foundation for Health and Human Rights hosted a conference of the International Network of Health and Human Rights Organisations (INHHRO) from November 3 to 5, 1995 in the Netherlands. Its objective was to share de& Is of the work done by the organisations associated with the network and to discuss a document titled Making standards work: an international handbook on good prison practices (1) issued by Penal Reform International, The Hague. Representatives from seventeen health and human rights organisations and other invitees participated in this conference. Due to constraints of space, only two issues pertinent for our readers are discussed in this report.

1. While ‘Making standards work’ is a well researched and useful book for prison authorities, health and human rights activists interested in implementing the international standards in prisons, the standard of health care inside and outside the prison generated debate and raised ethical issues. The document says that the level of health care and medication in prison should bc at least equivalent to that in the community outside it. An obvious question raised by the document as well as the participants, particularly those from underdeveloped countries, where the level of health care actually available to a vast majority of poor is abysmally low, was, ‘Should medical care in the prison be better than that available or would be available to that prisoner, outside it? ‘ The document answers the question in the affirmative as while a person outside is at liberty to seek better treatment, a prisoner is deprived of such an option. This position runs parallel to the situation in USA where a better standard of health care is legally granted to prisoners and psychiatric patients undergoing involuntary hospital treatment, but not to those uninsured and the underprivileged.
2. The second issue related to interaction between human rights and health organisations. While the human rights organisations have largely concentrated on the violation of liberty of individuals or groups by the state, progressive health organisations have given priority to people’s right to health care.

The first level of interaction between these two sets of organisation has resulted in the health organisations taking active interest’ in opposing the violation of human rights by health workers and their participation in coverups. They have also provided treatment to victims of torture. However, we have yet to see human rights organisations broadening the scope of their work by incorporating the right to basic health care as’a major human rights issue. Mutual broadening of perspectives will play a crucial role in consolidating the shared work of human rights and health organisations. Indeed, adequate attention to people’s right to health care by human rights movements and similar active interest in prisoners’ right to health care by the health movement would reduce the apparent dichotomy bctwcen the demandfor good health care for prisoners when underprivileged people outside prisons are’ not getting even low level primary health care as a basic right.

As regards India, Danish doctors discussed the health of displaced Kashmiri people who were tortured by security forces. A study of police custody deaths (1981-90) in Maharashtra by CEHAT, Bombay was also presented. The representation by the Forum for Medical Ethics Society to the Supreme Court of India on its January 1995 judgement directing the prison doctor to participate in the death penalty (2) in violation of medical ethics, was discussed. Individuals and organisations participating at the Netherlands conference decided to appeal the Chief Justice of Supreme Court of India for a review of the judgement.