A/61/338 The right to health encompasses norms and obligations which are relevant in each of these contexts. B. What can the right to health add to policies and programmes to reduce maternal mortality? 22. At the United Nations Millennium Summit (2000), States adopted the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration includes a commitment to reduce maternal mortality by three quarters by the year 2015.25 The Millennium Development Goals (the Goals), which derive from the Millennium Declaration, and which include a commitment to improve maternal health, have become the central platform for international development efforts. 23. Maternal mortality had been an international focus for many years prior to the Goals.26 However, the Goals represent a renewed and perhaps greater opportunity for reducing maternal mortality. They give relatively greater prominence to this issue, include time-bound targets, are supported by an international apparatus to advise on their implementation, have generated significant support from donors and international organizations, and have increasingly shaped national and international development policies. 24. At the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) held in Cairo, from 5 to 13 September 1994, States recognized that sexual and reproductive health is essential to development. In contrast, the Millennium Development Goals are silent on this relationship. However, at the 2005 World Summit, States reaffirmed the ICPD position through committing to: “achieving universal access to reproductive health by 2015, as set out in the ICPD, integrating this goal into strategies to attain the international agreed development goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration, aimed at reducing maternal mortality [and] improving maternal health”.27 25. While the target for achieving Goal 5 is reducing maternal mortality by three quarters by 2015, its broader goal is improving maternal health. In the last decade, there has been an increasing focus on improving maternal health. In particular, greater attention is rightly being given to obstetric fistula. In 2003 UNFPA and other United Nations agencies launched the global Campaign to End Fistula. 26. The Goals — and a good number of national and international policy frameworks — do not explicitly contain a focus on the right to health or other rights. A related issue is whether the right to health has a contribution to make in the context of policymaking for the reduction of maternal mortality, as well as towards improving maternal health. 27. The Millennium Project Task Force on Child Health and Maternal Health, charged with developing recommendations for Goal 5, is unequivocal in its recognition of the role of human rights, including the right to health, in policymaking to reduce maternal mortality. Other actors have also advocated a rights-based approach to health policymaking, and some have taken steps to integrate human rights into their maternal mortality policies and programmes. 28. There are several reasons why the right to health has a constructive contribution to make in the context of maternal health policymaking: 8 06-51997