Patient Rights are Human Rights—Why a Decolonial Approach Is Necessary for All in Europe

Patient Rights in Europe

European patient rights emerged from a historical reckoning over human wrongs. After centuries in which medicine was entangled with eugenics, war, institutionalization, and biomedical abuse, Europe sought to constrain medical power through law. Frameworks such as the European Charter of Patients’ Rights and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights articulate guarantees of access, information, consent, privacy, safety, quality of care, and avenues for complaint and compensation. These rights matter. They create legal limits on what institutions are permitted to do to bodies.

Yet these frameworks are built on a particular image of the patient: a rational, autonomous subject who speaks the language of institutions, who trusts biomedical authority, and who is psychologically safe enough to negotiate within it. This figure is not universal. It is historically specific, shaped by European liberalism and by the biomedical way of producing knowledge — or, in exclusive academic language, epistemology.

A decolonial approach becomes necessary not because some groups are different, diverse, or any future adjectives to label otherness, but because the European model itself is narrow.

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What European patient rights protect

European patient rights are designed to regulate procedures:
How consent is obtained,
How information is delivered,
How data is handled,
How harm is reported,
How care is reimbursed.

They stabilize the system. They make medicine legible, auditable, and administratively accountable. They are essential for preventing overt malpractice — for standardized care applied to standardized bodies and standardized minds.

Yet, humanity is not standardized. Human life is naturally diverse when it refuses to be dehumanized and reduced to uniform data.

European patient rights do not address the deeper layer of harm that arises:
When Western science and healthcare misrecognize bodies that do not fit into standards
When they doubt patients’ pain that does not comply with textbooks,
When they strip cultural meaning away, that does not echo the scientific culture
When they pathologize patient resistance to the scientific philosophy’s inherent dehumanization into non-compliance
When they interpret historical silence as consent.

These overlooked forms of institutionalized harm do not appear easily in legal complaints, yet they shape clinical reality every day. They shape it for all patients, even if they do so more severely for those Western science has historically marginalized — racialized groups, migrants, people living with Western-labeled disabilities, Indigenous peoples (such as the Sámi), people living in poverty, and other marginalized communities by eugenics, the debunked, early-twentieth-century mainstream Western science that aimed to purify and standardize humanity.

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What a decolonial approach reveals

A decolonial framework does not reject rights; it reframes what rights are meant to protect.

Where European systems prioritize informed consent, decolonial analysis highlights how consent is shaped by fear, dependency, language asymmetry, and historical memory. Where European systems emphasize privacy, decolonial thinking draws attention to extraction — of data, of tissue, of narrative — and to who benefits from that extraction. Where European systems speak of personalization, decolonial frameworks ask whose culture, whose temporality, whose reality — or, in exclusive academic language, ontology — is allowed to count as legitimate.

In this decolonized and person-centred view, health is not only a biomedical condition but a relational state: between body and institution, memory and diagnosis, history and protocol. Harm does not occur only through incorrect treatment. It also occurs when entire ways of being are rendered insignificant, crushed by the overweight of clinical significance inside clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare institutions.

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Why this is not only about people historically marginalized by Western science

Colonial logic is not limited to race or empire. It is a way of organizing power through hierarchy, extraction, and control. It appears whenever efficiency overrides presence, whenever metrics replace meaning, whenever compliance is mistaken for healing.

Illness, disability, aging, trauma, and dependency all expose the limits of the liberal, individualized patient model. In these natural states, where social and cultural power imbalances reign, the promise of equal negotiation collapses. What remains is a person inside a system, navigating vulnerability and authority.

A decolonial approach becomes necessary precisely because no one remains sovereign forever. This is what the COVID-19 pandemic and its technical, clinical, and scientific management taught in 2020 — if there is finally a willingness to humanely learn from it.

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What decolonial patient rights make visible

European patient rights aim to ensure that people are treated according to context, rather than according to a single external standard imposed by Western science.

Decolonial patient rights insist that people are recognized.

In this decolonized and re-humanized, person-centered approach, recognition means that bodies are not reduced to codes, histories are not erased in the name of neutrality, and suffering is not dismissed because it does not align with dominant biomedical narratives. It means that care is not only about survival, but about dignity, coherence, and epistemic — that is, knowledge — survival inside medical institutions.

European patient rights keep systems accountable.
Decolonial patient rights keep humanity intact.

One regulates medicine.
The other asks what kind of world medicine is helping to build.