Amplify the importance and sustainability of UHC and the prevention and control of NCDs with a Framework Convention on Global Health at the 4th HLM on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases
1 May 2025 – According to the World Health Organization, non-communicable cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory diseases cause three-quarters of deaths worldwide and are largely preventable. Though the COVID-19 Pandemic was a stark reminder of the perils of poor readiness and the strain that a sudden surge in illness can place on fragile health systems, even in high-income countries, the high burden of non-communicable disease remains the dominant preventable challenge. NCDs remain a slow-moving, constant crisis. In communities with scarce health care resources, preventing all diseases and injuries to the fullest extent possible is an essential component of an effective, affordable system of universal health care and health protection systems. As world leaders have come together and agreed on a global treaty to protect use against pandemics like COVID-19, they should recognize that a treaty could be a powerful instrument for addressing NCDs.
Civil society organizations are proposing one such treaty, the Framework Convention on Global Health, which would be grounded in human rights and aimed at national and global health equity. Its power could help establish a benchmark for national governments worldwide to advance a human right of everyone to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, as asserted in the Constitution of the World Health Organization, including robust disease and injury prevention, and universal access to high-quality healthcare without financial impediments.
Such a Convention should underscore the importance of safeguarding health equity, community accountability, and the primacy of the human right to health over all commercial contractual rights that might otherwise obstruct the right to health. It should stress measures to recognize and redress the social determinants of health including health protection law, policy and public finance decisions governing domains outside of traditional health care systems, such as risks and benefits in the marketplace, the workplace, research and education, transportation, agriculture and food systems, social security, criminal justice systems, and the natural environment.
Member states should formally recognize their support for and their commitments to realizing the human right to health to the full extent of their economic, technical, and fiscal capacities and make full use of their legal and regulatory authority to enforce that right and protect it from abuses by third parties in recognition that all measures to protect the right to health are investments in human health, healthy life expectancy, and the right to prosperous development of populations.
The Framework Convention on Global Health Alliance (FCGH Alliance), a Geneva-based global coalition of more than 100 NGOs, experts, and people, urge United Nations member states to build on previous Political Declaration on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Disease in 2011, 2014, and 2018 and mindful of the 2019 Political Declaration on Universal Health Coverage.