‘Health legislation in developing countries must be improved’

Brigit Toebes conducts research related to both human rights and health. At present she is working on drawing up and defining international health law, a new field in international law. She recently founded Global Health Law Groningen . One of Toebes’s aims is to improve health legislation in developing countries.

Toebes: 'Take the fairly strong tobacco legislation. Many countries don't have this. So what you see is that the tobacco industry is searching for new markets, developing and middle-income countries. Such countries are less well-equipped to control the tobacco industry. The result is that smoking increases, and thus related chronic diseases too. That's really quite a tragedy.'