Inspiring Insights

The main program of the 20th IUHPE World Conference on Health Promotion will be initiated with an opening plenary session entitled ‘Inspiring insights into health and sustainable development‘ on Sunday at 4 p.m.

The conference will be opened by Pascal Strupler, Director of the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), and IUHPE President David McQueen, who will each give a short welcome address. Zsuzsanna Jakab, Regional Director Europe of the World Health Organization, and Michael Hübel, head of the Health Determinants unit at the European Commission, will then introduce the conference theme ‘Health, Equity and Sustainable Development.‘

Following the technical keynote speeches there will be a panel discussion with all the speakers. The keynote speakers are Sarah Cook, the director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, and Paul Hunt from the Human Rights Centre at the University Essex, U.K.

Cook, a development economist and China specialist, will hold a speech on health policy in Asia. The director of the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has conducted research on women’s work, the social and distributional impacts of economic reform in China, social policy in Asia, and the rise of China as a development actor. Between 2000 and 2005, she worked as program officer in the Ford Foundation’s Beijing office. She is co-director of a multi-country research and network-building program on ‘Social Protection in Asia’ and involved in a comparative study of informal employment in China and India. Hunt will talk about his experience of being the first appointed UN Special Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health between 2002 and 2008.

Hunt, a professor in law, promoted and protected the right to the highest attainable standard of health. His main focus is on poverty, discrimination and the right to health. As an independent expert, he undertook country missions and submitted reports to the UN General Assembly and UN Commission on Human Rights, now the UN Human Rights Council. He has lived and worked in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Pacific.

The full program can be downloaded from the conference website: http://www.iuhpeconference.net/downloads/en/100623_Programmbook-Final-Version.pdf



Contact: Andreas Herren, Promotion Santé Suisse, phone: +41 (79) 799 00 46
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