• Johnattan Garcia Ruiz

    Johnattan Garcia Ruiz MPH, MBA is a Visiting Scientist affiliated with the Takemi Program in International Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Global Health and Population. He is also a Lecturer at Universidad de los Andes School of Law and Universidad del Rosario School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Bogota, Colombia.

    He received his Law degree from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, a Master of Public Health degree in Global Health from Harvard University, and an MBA from Reuben College, University of Oxford.

    Johnattan most recently participated as Senior Associate at the Harvard Health Systems Innovation Lab. In his early career, he served at the Colombian Ministry of Health and Social Protection on drug access and price regulation as a legal advisor to the Director of Medicines and Health Technologies. He co-founded the Environmental and Public Health Law Clinic at Universidad de los Andes School of Law, where he participated as amicus curiae for the Colombian Constitutional Court on cases related to pharmaceutical policy and the right to health of indigenous communities. During his MPH program, Johnattan interned at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. and the World Health Organization Centre for Health Development in Kobe, Japan. During his MBA, he was a member of the Social Impact Lab in the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford. He was also a researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society – Dejusticia.

    As an independent consultant, Johnattan has led research projects with Oxfam International to understand the inequities of the COVID-19 vaccine distribution in Latin America, with the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre to explore the challenges of falsified medicines in Colombia and with ACCESS Health International on the use of Fintech to improve Universal Health Care in Latin America.

    His research interests include global health, health systems, social entrepreneurship to improve population health, health reforms, and the political economy of global health.

     

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Featured Publications

Decriminalizing HIV in Colombia

Johnattan Garcia Ruiz, Sergio Duran Silva, Lina Maria Caicedo Rodriguez, Maria Alejandra Perez Rodríguez, Diego Duarte Escobar, and Alejandro Leon Marin. 12/31/2021. “Decriminalizing HIV in Colombia.” HPHR, 38. Publisher's VersionAbstract
HIV criminalization is a counterproductive strategy that does not respond to scientific evidence and undermines public health. Since 1987, multiple countries included offenses in their criminal codes related to the transmission of HIV or the non-disclosure of HIV-positive status to sexual partners. The Colombian criminal code established that any person that was aware of having HIV or hepatitis B infection and displayed any actions that could spread the diseases would be sentenced to six to twelve years of prison. Nineteen years later, the Colombian Constitutional Court decided a case which challenged the criminal offence that penalized HIV and Hepatitis B Transmission. With the support of multiple evidence-based and human rights arguments from the civil organizations and the academia, the Court ruled in favor of eliminating the HIV and Hepatitis B transmission offense from the criminal code, recognizing that people diagnosed with HIV have been subject to stigmatization and discrimination. The high court also condemned the criminalization of HIV as it discouraged people from accessing to diagnostic tests, especially in high-risk groups already disproportionately profiled by the justice system. The Colombian case provides an example of how litigation could be explored to eliminate HIV criminalization in other countries.
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