Tlaleng Mofokeng

South African physician and human rights advocate, appointed UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health in July 2020 and reappointed in 2023. Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University. Chair of the Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health.

Her 2023 thematic report to the Human Rights Council, Food, nutrition and the right to health (A/HRC/54/50), argues that adequate nutrition is a determinant of health outcomes rather than a matter of caloric sufficiency, and that current global frameworks fail to translate the right to food into enforceable nutritional entitlements. The framing converges directly with the operationalization the present resource proposes.

Recent output includes reports on harm reduction, on the racialization of medical structures, and on the structural determinants of health.

Why she matters here

The 2023 report is, in substance, an early draft of the argument this resource develops: that the right to food is meaningless without a substantive account of what adequate nutrition requires, and that the failure to specify has produced a floor rather than a right.