The Right to Health is a fundamental human right that has been incorporated into treaties at international and regional levels – making health a matter of international law, not only of policy – and domesticated into national laws, policies, and strategies throughout Africa. Significantly, the majority of Constitutions do not expressly provide for the Right to Health. Instead, the Right to Health must be inferred from other directly expressed rights. In these cases, the international human rights treaties are critically important as legally binding reminders to States parties of the obligations they have undertaken.

Many States have adopted obligations around non-discrimination, the right to health and the right to bodily integrity. Many States have ratified international and regional conventions and treaties relating to women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights, including CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol. Few States, however, make explicit constitutional provisions for women’s access to reproductive health and, specifically, to reproductive choice as a factor central to the health, social and economic development of women.

States whose Constitutions confirm the right to bodily integrity or bodily autonomy are obligated to respect the intrinsic dignity of human beings, including their rights to be self-determining and self-governing of their physical bodies. Respect for bodily integrity might include, for example, respecting a woman’s right to make reproductive choices that include termination of pregnancy; protection from involuntary HIV-testing, or the humiliation and violation of forced anal testing for suspected gay and bisexual men, or involuntary sterilisation; equal protections and benefits for transgender persons. The prominence of the Right to Bodily Integrity varies across Constitutions: it is explicitly expressed in a few countries; indirectly inferred or differently described in others and, concerningly, entirely absent in others.