Good morning, my colleagues and friends, and thank you for this opportunity to speak about human rights and tobacco control.
As we shall see, this is an increasingly important area and offers significant opportunities to advance the interests of human health while focusing on those corporations and enterprises with business models that place profits before the public interest.
First, let me tell you a little about the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the WHO FCTC, which is closely involved in the human-rights work that we are discussing today.
The WHO FCTC is the public health treaty that prompts the UN to work on global tobacco control and entered into force 11 years ago. It has been extensively adopted by the world community and now has 180 Parties, all of whom have pledged to implement its provisions.
It is plain to me, as head of the Convention Secretariat, that this treaty would never have been needed if tobacco was a new product. Faced with a substance that demonstrably kills its consumers, the world’s governments would act without hesitation. Tobacco would be banned or never entered into markets.
Sadly, in the four-to-five centuries since tobacco became one of the first transcontinentally traded products, a wealthy and powerful industry has developed which ruthlessly exploits tens of millions of addicts, have free access to decision-makers, to traduce high-quality academic research and creates a myth that the consumption of its noxious goods is a manifestation of individual freedom.
Tobacco consumption kills about six million people a year, and as the industry reaches out to engorge itself on new markets in low- and middle-income countries, where tobacco control legislation tends to be weaker, the toll of death and illness is fast-increasing.
You might think that this industry would die of shame. You would be wrong.
And that’s the first lesson I would offer from our experience with the WHO FCTC. Don’t expect an industry, which profits from human misery to be your friend. Make sure it’s kept at arm’s length.
This may sound obvious, but for many decades decision-makers relied on the tobacco industry to help with research and policy-making. Only when tobacco industry internal documents were made public – often as a result of legal action - showing the dishonest behaviour of these companies, were they excluded from public policy forums.
The WHO FCTC recognises this in several ways, but particularly under Article 5.3, which simply states:
In setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry in accordance with national law.
Enforcement of such provisions is a huge job and requires continuous vigilance. That often means taking examples of bad tobacco industry behaviour to governments and insisting on action, which can be a slow process. But without this critical first step, it’s hard to achieve anything.
From the outset, the importance of human rights was woven into the fabric of the WHO FCTC. In its preamble, for example, it refers to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
And it couldn’t really work any other way, because what we are asserting is the individual’s inherent right to protection from powerful organizations which, left unchallenged, will knowingly cause harm. And that includes a series of regulatory measures on the production, marketing and sales of tobacco.
Parties to the WHO FCTC acknowledge the individual’s right to the highest attainable standard of health, and the link between this and the tobacco epidemic. This right requires Parties to develop national health strategies and plans of action, especially for vulnerable or marginalized groups.
One key lesson we have learned is that treaties offer mutual reinforcement. For example, the CRC imposes an obligation on Parties to take steps to protect children from tobacco, especially second-hand tobacco smoke, while the WHO FCTC’s Article 8 also gives a right to protection from exposure to tobacco smoke in public places.
This is a dynamic process and human rights has become a more important element of the Convention’s work. How else could one examine issues like child labour in tobacco farming, or the poorly regulated sale of tobacco products to people in low-income countries? These issues too should be considered when regulating the behaviour of businesses and their impact on human rights.
The world is increasingly willing to recognise the damage done by tobacco companies and to act against them. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, agreed upon last year, acknowledges human rights as a key starting point and also include a pledge to strengthen implementation of the WHO FCTC. Meanwhile, the Addis Ababa Agenda for Action recommended tobacco taxation as a means of financing development, a recognition that transnational corporations must be held financially accountable.
There is another important lesson contained within the WHO FCTC – articles requiring the public dissemination of information about those goods that may damage them, something we might describe as the disinfectant of sunlight, a remedy to transnational corporations diseases.
The tobacco industry, like all businesses selling harmful goods, wants to distort the evidence about its products and to use advertising to create a demand. In short, the industry promotes untruthful sales information and seeks to hide truthful material. Full ban on advertising, promotion and sponsorship, regulations about packaging and free access to the facts about product contents are absolutely central to engaging with this challenge.
Big tobacco’s affection for the Big Lie is an enduring characteristic. So we should also focus on another issue and that’s the misuse of human rights language.
For some years now, we have noted the tobacco industry’s grotesque adoption of human rights terminology as it seeks to continue the mass poisoning of its customers.
This is a fundamental right, it argues. Yes, tobacco may cause serious harm but if people choose to consume, who can stand in their way? You will hear similar arguments from the alcohol industry and processed foods industry.
This is both ludicrous and dangerous, and must be challenged. Governments have a duty to foster the public good and to act against speech that is harmful. Nowhere is there a right to smoke, but everywhere there is a right to life.
More worrying still is the tobacco industry’s attempts to use investment arbitration cases to challenge tobacco control decisions in jurisdictions as varied as Uruguay and Australia. Yet in both cases, the fact that the WHO FCTC was cited and upheld demonstrates the significance of international legally binding instruments to safeguard human rights.
No single organization or treaty can provide all the answers but I believe the WHO FCTC provides some guidance and, hopefully, inspiration on our future direction.
Start by cleansing the public policy arena of those corporations whose actions or products threaten human rights. Impose strict rules on conflicts of interest and covert influence peddling. Seek opportunities to reinforce the human rights agenda using the WHO FCTC, for example underlining the worldwide acceptance of measures to protect the vulnerable and the poor, measures which 180 Parties are already legally bound to defend. Demand that corporations make public any information relating to public health and ban misleading packaging and advertising. And reinforce this simple message – human rights never give commercial entities the freedom to mislead, injure or kill their consumers.
We are only just starting out on the road ahead and it will be a long journey. In the end, however, there’s very little doubt where this process will end: in making liable the industries that promote products that may harm their consumers and the complete removal of products which do kill and which have no place in the lives of the world’s citizens.
Thank you.