International Law Allows Marijuana to be Legalized

The strict growth and selling of recreational marijuana are allowed thanks to the states’ positive human rights obligations. This is due to various experiments and results from Legal scholars Piet Hein van Kempen and Masha Fedorova from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

There have been many people asking that a cannabis industry may be legalized. Most of the arguments these people tend to use arguments concerning the health of the public as well as the individual. Among that are also arguments concerning crime. Up to now, though, there has been no research about the legal implications of what would happen if marijuana was legalized. International law and cannabis II (International Recht en cannabis II) are the first to research marijuana and positive human rights obligations.

Legal scholars Piet Hein van Kempen and Masha Fedorova are conducting the study. They have shown that these positive human rights obligations can call for states to give restricted legalization of a cannabis industry if this were to protect human rights more so than a ban on all drugs, as explicated in the United Nations Drugs Conventions.

Kempen and Fedorov’s analysis also produced an affirmative answer to another very important inquiry: from a global law perspective, should states prioritize the states or their commitment to the United Nations? Here are the five conditions for legalization:

“1. This must be in the interest of the protection of human rights.

2. The state must demonstrate that the regulated legalization of the cultivation and trade of cannabis will result in the most effective protection of human rights.

3. The decision regarding such regulation must have public support and must be decided through the nationwide democratic process.

4. There must be a closed system so that foreign countries are not disadvantaged in any way by this measure.

5. The state is required to actively discourage cannabis use.”