Tobacco and Human Rights

The Human Rights and Tobacco Control Network, a relatively new organization formally chartered in 2012, is examining a wide range of tobacco issues through a human rights lens.  At the annual World Conference on Tobacco and Health in May 2015, the Network sponsored a panel examining, among other things, “the potential criminal liability of tobacco executives in domestic and international legal systems, as well as the potential human rights violations perpetrated by the industry.”  More information on this analysis is available from ASH, “Action on Smoking and Health,” one of the founding organizations of the HRTCN.

In the U.S., human rights advocates have focused on child labor in the domestic tobacco industry.  A comprehensive look at the issue is available here.  Proposed legislation restricting the practice is pending in Congress.  Some companies have adopted their own international restrictions.

Sixteen years ago today, June 17, the member states of the International Labor Organization unanimously approved Convention 182, which bars the Worst Forms of Child Labor.  Included in the list of prohibited activities is “work which, by its very nature or the conditions in which it is undertaken, is likely to jeopardise the health, safety or morality of children.”  The U.S. ratified Convention 182 in 1999.

The jury is certainly no longer out on whether the practice of child labor in the tobacco industry jeopardizes their health and safety.  Every day that Congress delays action compounds the human rights impacts on this vulnerable population.  But at the same time, as many activists note, the issue goes beyond the lack of regulation.  Economic inequality, lack of a living wage, forces working families to jeopardize their health in order to survive.  Child labor in the tobacco fields is a terrible symptom of these larger issues.  Our efforts to find a cure for child labor must also focus on the disease itself.