Groningen Centre for Health Law

Most Dutch mothers go back to work after 16 weeks of paid maternity leave, as regulated in the Act on work and care (Wet arbeid en zorg). They carry their pump (or more often give up breastfeeding), they bring their baby to the nursery/’guestmother’ (or find other arrangements), and they try to focus on their work. It all sounds as if this is working well. But if we scratch beneath the surface, there is a lot of struggle going on in a mother’s psyche.

Our own member Lucía Berro Pizzarossa has been selected as a WomenDeliver Young Leader!

Brigit Toebes – ‘Take the fairly strong tobacco legislation. Many countries don’t have this. So what you see is that the tobacco industry is searching for new markets, developing and middle-income countries.

How do you actually apply the right to health on the ground? The Danish Institute for Human Rights is developing the AAAQ Toolbox – an innovative assessment tool that offers practical guidance for state, business and civil society actors.

Veronika Flegar and Brigit Toebes recently published an opinion piece on the current debate around minimum reception facilities for rejected asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in the two Dutch newspapers Dagblad van het Noorden and Leeuwarder Courant.

A couple of months have passed since the CEC v the Netherlands ruling of the European Social Committee (ESC) on 10 November 2014 but the Netherlands is still hesitant to take steps to ensure basic social rights of undocumented migrants.

Deportation of persons with a medical condition: the Dutch National ombudsman criticizes the immigration authorities of the Netherlands for an insufficiently clear evaluation of the medical resources available in the country of origin. At the same time, Judge Pinto de Albuquerque points to the meager guidance of the European Court of Human Rights in that respect in his dissenting opinion to the recent case of S. J. v Belgium.

On 19 March the Department of International Law of the University of Groningen held its second case law discussion, organised by colleagues Monika Ambrus and Panos Merkouris.

On February 19, 2015, a group of experts in law, public health, security and medicines, met in Geneva under the auspices of the Global Health Law Committee of the International Law Association and the Global Health Programme of the Graduate Institute|Geneva.

In its judgment of 27 January 2015, the European Court of Human Rights dealt with  a prematurely born baby’s death in an ambulance, a few hours after birth, following the baby’s transfer between hospitals without being admitted for treatment.