The right to health is a human right expressly acknowledged as such within international law for nearly eight decades. According to the World Health Organisation, and in the opinion of many experts in the field, all other rights are, without health, themselves meaningless. However, forming as it does part of the group of social and economic human rights, the right to health shares the fate of that group of being disputed and neglected, in particular when compared to the group of civil and political human rights. This clash of different views of the right to health is where the interest for the topic lies and for that reason this paper is dedicated in its entirety to that human right alone. The first steps towards international regulation of health matters occurred long before the establishment of the modern international community of the 20th century, but it was not until 22 July 1946, with the adoption of the constitution of the World Health Organisation, that 'health' was defined for the first time ever in a source of international law and also acknowledged as a human right. By the end of the 1970s, the right to health had become a more prominent subject of discussion within the international scientific community, continuing to reach a higher level of exposure during the 1990s, mostly due to the spread of AIDS and its impact on human rights in general. That was also the time when the first scientific journals on the intertwined topics of human rights and health started to appear, when the first academic papers on the right to health appeared and when the preparation of material for General Comment No 14 on the right to health got underway, published by the Committee for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 2000. In 2002, the position of UN special rapporteur for human right to health was established, and the era of court proceedings began, first at national, and then at regional level, where the rights to health became the central content of hearings. With the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, health has become a key issue for the whole of humanity. By way of three topical units of the paper, covering, among other, the historical development of all human rights, the philosophical-theoretical background to their concept, their content according to sources of international law, and an indication of the problems in their implementation, in particular with regard to overlaps with economic factors, then through the comparison of the two groups of human rights, the economic, social and cultural on the one hand and the civil and political on the other, for the sake of proving their equivalence, the central focus of the paper is reached – the right to health. After an overview of the uninterrupted and safe development of this, primarily contractual, human right, and after IV determining and analysing its content in as detailed a manner as possible, the paper explains why human health is valued so highly and the causal relationship of that value with its legal status as an explanation for its conceptual and theoretical foundation. The paper also determines and portrays the role of the main actors, offers an overview and an analysis of the enforcement of the right to health before the international courts and examines the effects of the global health crisis caused by the outbreak of COVID-19. The goal of this research is to defend the positive legal nature of the right to health, while offering a detailed description and overview of the development and content of that human right. It is also necessary to modernise the insight into the position of the right to health with regard to global economic impacts and the latest global health crisis. The paper is embarked upon with the assumption that the right to health could have by now acquired the character of customary law, thereby becoming binding for subjects that would otherwise fall outside its scope of application if it were considered as a purely contractual right. It also intends to demonstrate that changes to economic systems, both international and national, are required for the successful enforcement of the right to health. The research is carried out by way of a review of written science papers, professional papers and reports of international bodies and officials, as well as of international treaties and other international instruments, and publications of international organization and nongovernmental organizations and other actors. Qualitative and quantitative content of various databases is also used, and part of the research is based on the review and analysis of the judicial practice of international courts. The paper mainly conducts qualitative theoretical research of the human right to health in international law, with quantitative research of only a few elements of the content. By analysing the content presented in the abovementioned sources of information, through comparisons, case studies and statistical methods, own assumptions and conclusions are reached.