Pain Relief & Palliative Care: A Basic Human Right!
Human Rights Watch and the Open Society Foundations came together with six other international organizations, including Pallium India, to host a side-event during the recent 17th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The Objective? A Human Rights Council resolution declaring: “Access to pain relief as a human right.”
Dr Tabaré Vázquez, an oncologist and the former President of Uruguay, was the star of the show.
He is a champion who, while President, took such stern anti–tobacco measures that the cigarette company Philip Morris sued the Uruguayan Government in the name of an International Free Trade Agreement.
Indeed, the President was interfering with the tobacco company’s fundamental right to kill more people!
During his opening address, Dr Vázquez said,
Just as access to Health care should be a basic human right, so should access to Palliative Care be, as an integral part of it.