The Case for International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Control

This special section of Health and Human Rights Journal examines some of the many ways in which international and domestic drug control laws engage human rights and create an environment of enhanced human rights risk. In this edition, the authors address specific human rights issues such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health (including health protection and promotion measures, as well as access to controlled substances as medicines) and indigenous rights, and how drug control laws affect the protection and fulfillment of these rights. Other authors explore drug control through the lens of cross-cutting human rights themes such as gender and the rights of the child. Together, the contributions illustrate how international guidelines on human rights and drug control could help close the human rights gap—and point the way to drug laws and policies that would respect, protect, and fulfill human rights rather than breach them or impede their full realization. Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational instrument of the modern system of international human rights law, a system now underpinned by nine core UN treaties and multiple regional conventions. The growth of the international human rights regime has provided a critical tool to address the abusive and unaccountable exercise of state power. Multilateral treaties on drug control predate the foundation of international human rights law by several decades. Beginning with the 1912 International Opium Convention and evolving through a series of conventions adopted under the auspices of the League of Nations, drug control was already a well-established subject of international law by the time the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration in 1948, and the first UN drug convention in 1961.1 The preamble of that treaty, the Single Convention on