Postdoctoral researcher – University of Graz, Austria
Duration of stay: October 2025 to July 2026
In cooperation with Prof. Dr. Rainer Forst
Global Health Justice Postdoctoral Programme funded by Höppsche Stiftung gGmbH, Villmar
Romina Rekers is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Graz, where she led the FWF-funded project “A Political Conception of Transitional Justice.” She is an associate member of the Climate Change Field of Excellence at the University of Graz and the principal investigator of the projects “Climate-Health Adaptation Strategies in South America” and “Women’s Participation in Climate-Sensitive Infectious Disease Policy in Paraguay,” supported by the Oxford–Johns Hopkins Global Infectious Disease Ethics Collaborative (GLIDE). She also directed the WHO-funded project “A Case of Co-Production of Climate-Health Research Ethical Rules with Members of Grassroots Women’s Organizations in South America,” implemented by the University of Graz. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research has been supported by grants from the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).
Research project: The human right to health in the face of infectious diseases
In addressing the challenges posed by infectious diseases (IDs) to the human right to health, there are two aspects to consider: its content and its justification. This project address the question on how the transnational and intergenerational nature of IDs should reshape the content of the human right to health.
Identifying the content of the human right to health requires determining what is the protected interest and what is the threat(s), what are the threats against which it protects us, or what are the thresholds to be reached in order to protect these interests. This task also involves questions about the concrete rights and duties, the duty to protect/guarantee, negative and positive duties, and the level of protection required.
In this project, I will (provisionally) take as starting point the conception of human rights as a political practice (Beitz 2009). This practice encompasses moral, legal (international, regional, national), social/political (litigation, advocacy) and ethical dimensions.
In this 10-month project, I will focus on the duties of governments to protect the human right to health. The duty to protect can be correlated with the right not to have one’s health seriously threatened by others. And the duty to ensure the right to health correlates with the right to the highest/attainable standard of physical and mental health. The principle of progressivity and non-regressivity can help to specify the content of these specific duties and the level of protection and guarantee required.
This project will explore the hypothesis that some particular circumstances related to IDs may require to review the content of the duty to protect/guarantee the human right to health. Some of the circumstances to be explored are:
a. The communicable nature of IDs combined with porous borders for goods and people.
b. The evolving nature of the IDs.
c. The importance of other countries complying with IDs surveillance and containment regulations.
d. The importance of time and tipping points in the level of protection that policies/interventions can provide.
e. The risks of inequitable burden-sharing and the shifting of costs or vulnerabilities between countries.
f. The strong link with ecosystems.
This project aims to identify how the particular circumstances of IDs should shape the content of the duty to protect and guarantee the human right to health and the interpretation of the principles of progressivity and non-regressivity. To this end, it will cover three case studies:
1) Climate-sensitive infectious diseases
2) Pandemics
3) Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)
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Publikationen
Rekers, R., Gerbaldo, M. V., Yabar, C., Garat, C. R., & Rekers, L. (2025). Justice enablers of climate-health adaptation in South America. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 23, 100459. Rekers, R., de Araujo, M., Daly, T., Fior, P., Gerbaldo, M. V., Jamrozik, E., Palmeiro Silva, Y., Yabar, C., & Luna, F. (Accepted, 2025). Defining research priorities on climate-sensitive infectious disease justice for South America. In Climate Change and Health – Perspectives from Developing Countries. Climate Change Management series, Springer Nature. Rekers, R., & Luna, F. (2023). Pandemic justice for and from Latin America. In F. Luna, R. Rekers, E. Jamrozik, & R. Gur-Arie (Eds.), Global Pandemic Justice. ethic@ - An International Journal for Moral Philosophy, 22(1). Rekers, R. (2022). Epistemic transitional justice: The recognition of testimonial injustice in the context of reproductive rights. Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History & Feminist Theory, 25(1).