I didnt know that mothers and children had special mention in the Universal Declaration. Its good for to help maybe pressing the Govt to invest more in their health and welfare.

The Board Members of the IMAXI Cooperative have had the pleasure of knowing Anand Grover for many years, and of having him as a friend and ally. Even as the UNOHCHR Special Rapporteur for the Right to Health recently, he is always a integral part of the community and a comrade. Vive Anand!

From the Lancet:
"Prejudices can run deep, and fears instilled in childhood can be hard to shake, as Anand Grover, trailblazing human rights lawyer and UN Special Rapporteur for the right to health, knows only too well. Grover has fought for the rights of marginalised communities all his life. But he remains searingly honest about the judgmental thoughts that have sometimes sprung, unbidden, to his mind. Once, he recounts, he was having dinner with sex workers whose rights he had been championing; when they asked him to dance, he panicked momentarily about “being seen dancing with prostitutes”. This is why experiential knowledge is as important as abstract knowledge, for lawyers and doctors alike, he says. “You need to be able to connect with people, body and soul.”
Grover has always been politicised, even while studying biochemistry at the University of Surrey in the UK during the early 1970s. He needed to escape science though. “I loved the lab, but I was looking for things to change in the world.” With no desire to live in a country that, at the time, he found “difficult and racist in parts”, he moved to Mumbai, India, to study law. He couldn't have arrived at a more tumultuous time in India's history; the country was beset by political unrest and the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency that allowed her to suspend elections and curtail civil liberties. Against this difficult backdrop, Grover began to defend the rights of India's underserved people.
Grover's socialist sensibilities meant that it wasn't long before he co-founded the Lawyers Collective in Mumbai in 1981, a non-governmental organisation that provides legal aid to India's poor. The organisation has expanded to Bangalore and Delhi, and now has an international presence. The Lawyers Collective has had major wins in health and human rights, especially in HIV when the Collective won the right for HIV-positive people to be employed if they were reasonably fit and at no major risk of spreading the infection. The Lawyers Collective also fought for 9 years to overturn legislation that criminalised homosexual sex. Now, they are trying to push through a rights-based HIV bill that, Grover explains, “is stuck in bureaucracy between the health and law ministries”; the bill would include antidiscrimination legislation, access to treatment, and safe havens for drug users and sex workers.
Legal aid alone, however worthy, can only help individuals, and the Lawyers Collective has moved into strategic litigation to drive major policy and legislation change. A key focus has been drug patent law, battling restrictions on essential medicines. Grover has worked closely alongside other groups fighting for this, such as Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF's) access to medicines campaign in India. Like MSF, the Lawyers Collective has been concerned about an ongoing free trade agreement between India and the EU, which has been threatening to extend patent rights for pharmaceutical companies. So far, explains Grover, “their pressure has helped to resist encroachments on the flexibilities of the TRIPS agreement, which allows countries like India to produce generic versions of key drugs”. Leena Menghaney, at MSF's India office, pays tribute to Grover's efforts: “Some of the legal aid cases in which Anand represented individual persons from marginalised and vulnerable communities—people living with HIV/AIDS, sex workers, injecting drug users—turned out to be landmark cases on public health in India. In addition his resilience in the last decade in representing cancer and people living with HIV in patent disputes that affect access to Indian-made affordable generic drugs has also safeguarded access for millions of patients in other developing countries including in treatment projects of MSF.”
Few lawyers argue in such diverse areas of law as HIV, maternal health, sexual assault, patents, and the death penalty, and Grover says he's “lucky” to have the versatility that comes with practising law in India. “I might be in court on civil matters one day, criminal matters a second day, and arbitration a third day. And I love it”. Although Grover's cases are high profile, he seems to have little desire to become a legal superstar, and needed some coaxing by Sonia Correa, a Brazilian sexual rights advocate and good friend, to apply to be a UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health in 2008. When he did apply, there were many letters of support, including from celebrities like Richard Gere. Possibly because Grover is respectful of, but not overawed by, the UN, with its mix of “bright people and bureaucracy”, he can be bold in his reports. “I have never been the kind of person who just warms their chair. I want to take up important and difficult issues”.
One such issue is excessive law enforcement in drug control, and in last year's report, Grover argued that harsh penalties were not solving the problem of drug misuse, and often infringe on human rights. This year, he took on an even more politically sensitive topic—abortion—saying that anti-abortion laws “infringe women's dignity and autonomy by severely restricting decision making by women in respect of their sexual and reproductive health”. His reports are clearly hitting the mark as his term as UN Rapporteur has just been extended to 2014. As the UN marks Human Rights Day on Dec 10, it's evident that Grover has lost none of his zeal for changing the world he had as a young firebrand. He puts it down to being an “eternal optimist” and says his motivation remains strong: “More than anything, I think everyone has the basic human and fundamental right to a good life: the right to privacy, equality, autonomy, and free speech, as also the right to food, water, shelter, education, and health.”
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2811%2961...