The Emergence of the Right to Health in Taiwan: Transplantation from the West and Its Implementation

In past decades, the right to health has emerged from the margins of human rights discourse to claiming an increasingly central place. Many East Asian countries, including Taiwan, have recognized the right to health for every citizen either in domestic legal framework or through the recognition of international human rights laws. However, instead of creating a significant convergence of domestic legal framework, Taiwan has different perceptions and practices in the right to health protection levels. It is because that Taiwan has emphasized the traditional concerns of sovereignty and noninterference when adopting the right to health paradigm and asserted that human rights standards should differ according to cultural backgrounds. Therefore, even though Taiwan, based upon Chinese culture value, generally believes that the government has obligations to provide citizens with basic needs for healthcare, the preference for a large sphere of government intervention leads to neither a welfare state nor a high priority of individual social rights. In order to develop a thicker understanding of the right to health development in Taiwan, this chapter sets out to explore the phenomenon of the right to health legislation, litigation, and their consequences in Taiwan. This chapter will also investigate how Taiwanese government transplants or delivers the right to health norms in domestic legal system, explore whether there are arbitrary interpretations of the contents of the right to health by Taiwanese government that violate or restrict the right, and examine the ability of the judiciary in Taiwan when advancing the right to health.