The right to health includes the right to sexual and reproductive health and is paramount to the advancement of women’s rights as a whole.46 According to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “the right to health is an inclusive right, extending not only to timely and appropriate health care, but also to the underlying determinants of health, such as access to safe and potable water and adequate sanitation, healthy occupational and environmental conditions, and access to health-related education and information, including on sexual and reproductive health”.47 In General Comment No. 14, the Committee also explains that the right to health includes both freedoms and entitlements, including “the right to control one’s health and body, including sexual and reproductive freedom, and the right to be free from interference, such as the right to be free from torture, non-consensual medical treatment and experimentation”. This General Comment also contains the reference to the 3AQ: availability (existence of relevant facilities, services and programmes, including drugs), accessibility (non-discrimination, within physical reach, affordable and including health information), acceptability (including sensitivity to gender and life cycle) and quality.48 The Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in its General Recommendation No. 24 (1999) on women and health emphasizes the obligation of states to eliminate all discrimination against women in access to health services “throughout the life cycle, particularly in the areas of family planning, pregnancy, confi nement and during the post-natal period.” This should be done paying special attention “to vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, such as migrant women, refugee and internally displaced women, the girl child and older women, women in prostitution, indigenous women and women with physical or mental disabilities”. It is inappropriate for “a health care system [to lack] services to prevent, detect and treat illnesses specifi c to women” and it is “discriminatory for a State party to refuse to legally provide for the performance of certain reproductive health services for women”. Furthermore, States cannot “restrict women’s access to health services ... on the ground that women do not have the authorization of husbands, partners, parents or health authorities, because they are unmarried or because they are women.” Nor can States “criminalize medical procedures only needed by women” and “punish women who undergo those procedures”.49 The Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women50 found that a woman’s right to health care (Article 12.1) had been violated when the state did not secure fully informed consent to sterilization. Consequently, the Committee recommended clarifying the provisions on consent to sterilization and monitoring facilities providing sterilization. In another 46 OHCHR and WHO, Fact Sheet on “The Right to Health”. 47 Cf. Para. 14 of General Comment No. 14 on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, 2000. 48 Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights General Comment No. 14 from 2000 on the right to health. 110 49 Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, General Recommendation No. 24 from 1999 on women and health, paras. 2, 11 and 14. 50 CEDAW/C/36/D/4/2004, Ms. A. S. vs. Hungary