“God Showed Us the Way to Cleveland”: Introductory Remarks on the Relation Between Health Tourism and Human Rights

In recent times, in which health has been transformed from a public service into a commercial activity, health tourism has become a topic of discussion for human rights law. Health tourism can be defined as the movement of a person to a country other than the one he/she is resident at in order to get health services; and can be sub-categorised in three types of activities such as either emergency or regular surgeries and operations of a basic nature, discretionary operations and medical interventions and thermal tourism. Besides its close relations with a number of human rights, health tourism particularly contacts with the right to health at several levels. This article on one side endeavours to ground the protection of health tourism under the right to health; on the other side, it scrutinises the probability of infringement of the right to health of individuals who are under the jurisdiction of a state (which provides health services) and attempts to harmonise these two conflicting interests. The article also strives to reveal the relation between health tourism and other legal issues that fall into the field of human rights law such as abortion and euthanasia. In brief, the article describes the relation between health tourism and human rights in a general view.