Ending Childhood Obesity

Ending Childhood Obesity – A Challenge at the Crossroads of International Trade and Human Rights Law

Conference and Launch Event of the Law and Non-Communicable Diseases Unit

Childhood obesity, the prevalence of which has increased at alarming rates over the last 30 years in many countries worldwide, has become one of the most significant public health challenges for the 21st century. In 2014, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 41 million children under 5 years of age were overweight or obese, as a result of being raised in ‘obesogenic environments’ in both high-, low- and middle-income countries, cutting across all socio-economic groups.

At the 66th World Health Assembly in 2013, Member States adopted the WHO Global Action Plan on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) for 2013-2020, and agreed a voluntary target to halt the rise in diabetes and obesity by 2025. The Director General of WHO subsequently appointed a Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity (ECHO Commission) to produce a report specifying which approaches and combinations of interventions are likely to be most effective in tackling childhood and adolescent obesity in different contexts around the world. The Commission’s final report, which was published on 25 January 2016, proposes a range of recommendations for governments to reverse current childhood obesity trends. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the UN Assembly in 2015, also call on Member States to achieve improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture (SDG 2), and to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages (SDG 3).

As the ECHO Commission has explicitly acknowledged, the law can play an important role in helping change food environments with a view to promoting healthier lifestyles. For example, the Commission has identified priority areas which Member States should consider as part of effective prevention strategies, not least the regulation of food labelling and other sources of food information; the regulation of food marketing; and the use of economic instruments such as food subsidies and food taxes.

While such legal tools for building healthy environments are clearly available to States, their actual implementation and practical effectiveness may be limited by other legal rules, both international and domestic, which can sometimes have contrary or inhibiting effects. A drive to maximise the utility of the law in combatting childhood obesity demands a clear understanding of these actual or potentially limiting legal regimes and the manner in which their effects are realised. For example, a Member State wishing to regulate the food industry needs to understand precisely how it may do so within the constraints of existing international trade rules.

This, in turn, requires a clear grasp of the extent to which these rules afford discretion to Member States to limit the free flow of goods on grounds of public health. Clearly public health regulations and human rights do not exist in a vacuum. If a State should invoke the right to health and other children’s rights to justify tighter regulation of food markets and marketing, it will need to assess the probable legal response from food industry operators and other market actors with competing rights under domestic and international law, including the right to property, the right to ‘fair and equitable treatment’, or the right to freedom of expression.

In addition, a State wishing to regulate the food industry to prevent childhood obesity may be faced with difficult questions of allocation of powers, demanding answers as to whether, in federalist or quasi-federalist systems, a given rule should be adopted at the local, national or regional (e.g. EU) level. The resolution of all these issues requires engagement with a range of rules and complex legal arguments, which have, overall, tended to be underexplored to date.

This conference proposes to address the challenge of these intertwining rules and arguments, aiming to provide a clearer picture of the role of law in the fight against childhood obesity, and the ways of maximising its beneficial effects. It will more specifically explore the extent to which international trade and human rights law should interact to allow States to effectively protect children from growing obesity rates. It will focus on a range of overarching issues, including:

• whether, and if so to which extent, World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and International Investment Agreements (IIAs) have contributed to growing childhood obesity rates;
• whether, and if so how, the WTO and IIAs could accommodate childhood obesity concerns;
• what a ‘human rights approach’ entails and how it could contribute to reversing childhood obesity trends;
• how the Convention on the Rights of the Child could be invoked, with a specific focus on the relevance of the child’s right to health and the principle of the best interest of the child;
• whether international trade and human rights law really stem from different premises and pursue arguably irreconcilable objectives;
• what responsibilities international human rights law imposes on both States and non-State actors (including the food industry) in the global fight against childhood obesity;
• how international human rights law should be invoked in relation to childhood obesity and what remedies it could provide;
• whether harmonisation through the adoption of a global convention on healthy diets or through the adoption of labelling standards provides the most effective way forward to durably reverse current childhood obesity trends…

Attendance is free. If you are interested in attending, please contact Professor Amandine Garde at amandine.garde@liverpool.ac.uk