Bioethics and Health Law Journal (BHL)

The protection of children’s health in armed conflict lies at the intersection of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and global health governance. Although the existing legal framework formally recognizes robust protections for children, there remains a persistent and widening gap between normative commitments and their actual implementation in conflict settings. Against this backdrop, the present study examines the attack on Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab as a case through which structural deficiencies in the protection of children’s health become analytically visible. This study employs a descriptive-analytical and normative legal methodology. It first reconstructs the conceptual and doctrinal foundations of the right to health within international legal instruments and humanitarian law principles. It then applies a case-study approach to the Minab incident in order to evaluate the extent to which existing legal obligations are reflected or fail to be reflected in operational realities of armed conflict. The analysis further integrates a structural lens to assess systemic gaps beyond isolated violations. The findings indicate that the current international legal architecture suffers from structural limitations that significantly weaken the protection of children’s right to health in armed conflict. These include fragmented enforcement mechanisms, the marginalization of health considerations in military decision-making processes and the absence of operationalized, health-sensitive standards for assessing legality and proportionality. The Minab case illustrates how these deficiencies converge to produce a situation in which formal legal protections fail to translate into effective safeguards on the ground. The study argues that the existing compliance-oriented framework is insufficient to address the complexity of contemporary armed conflicts. It proposes a conceptual shift toward recognizing children’s health as a normative threshold for legality and legitimacy in the conduct of hostilities. Under this approach, the protection of health is not treated as a secondary humanitarian consideration but as a central evaluative criterion in assessing the lawfulness of military action. The Minab case thus functions not merely as an isolated incident, but as an analytical entry point into the structural crisis of children’s protection in international law.

Support for social mental health, despite its central role in preventing Social harms and criminal involvement, occupies a marginal and unstable position in Iran’s public policymaking. This article critically examines the high-level policy documents of the Islamic Republic of Iran - specifically the General Policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iran's Overall Vision Document for 2024, selected five-year Development Plans adopted from the early 1380s through the late (2000s-2010s) and annual budget laws enacted during the 1390s and early (2010s-early 2020s) - in order to assess the extent and quality of attention devoted to social mental health within Iran’s criminal policy framework. The study adopts a qualitative, interdisciplinary analytical approach, focusing on the conceptual and institutional linkages between criminal policy and social mental health as reflected in upstream policy texts and their modes of implementation. The findings demonstrate that references to social mental health in these documents are largely indirect, abstract and non-binding, often subsumed under vague notions such as “social harms”, “spiritual health” or limited support for chronic psychiatric patients. This marginalization is further intensified in budgetary legislation within the above period, where mental health is not treated as a rights-based public policy with a defined basic service package and a transparent, independent funding line, but rather as a fragmented, project-based expenditure dependent on annual fiscal conditions. The inconsistency between macro-level policy commitments - particularly the emphasis on prevention and mental health promotion in general health policies - and the treatment-oriented, short-term logic governing budget allocations has weakened social prevention mechanisms and shifted the burden of unmanaged mental health issues onto the criminal justice system. The article concludes that inadequate support for social mental health in high-level policy documents and related budget laws during the examined period represents not merely a shortcoming in public health governance, but a structural deficiency in criminal policy. This configuration reinforces reactive, stigmatizing and security-oriented responses, contributes to the reproduction of crime, increases penal costs and undermines social justice. Repositioning social mental health within upstream policy frameworks and budgetary structures is therefore essential for aligning criminal policy with preventive and health-oriented approaches.