One movement. One declaration. Every child.

Anchored in Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child · Signed by 196 countries

Every child has the right to grow up in a drug-free environment. Most people read that and nod along, assuming it’s a nice sentiment or a parenting preference. It’s neither. It’s law.

Article 33 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child obliges governments to protect children from drug use and the drug trade, and 196 countries signed it. Almost every country on earth. The right is real and it’s binding, and over the past few decades most of the world quietly stopped thinking about it. That forgetting is the reason a Dutch foundation called Rise4Life exists.

A network built on a right

Rise4Life is a Dutch foundation and international advocacy network with one mission: making sure every child grows up drug-free. Not as a moral statement, but as a legal right. The distinction matters more than it first appears. Moral statements can be argued about forever. A right that 196 countries have already signed is something you can hold a government to.

The foundation is careful about what it doesn’t claim to be. It doesn’t position itself as the expert in the room. It amplifies what scientists, researchers and policymakers are already saying and builds the platform that lets those voices be heard. Or in their own words, it builds the room.

One conviction sits at the centre of everything they do, and they put it plainly:

Legal does not mean safe. Normal does not mean harmless. That gap is what we make visible.

That gap, the space between what’s permitted and what’s actually good for a child, is the thing Rise4Life keeps trying to drag back into view.

The room that didn’t look away

In March 2025, Rise4Life co-organised a conference in Eindhoven called Wake-up, Drug-Free is the Key. For the first time, experts in policy, treatment and research sat in the same room as the people usually left out of these conversations: affected families, grassroots organisations, youth groups. They spent two days listening to what was actually happening, and two days arguing out what was needed.

On the third day, something nobody had planned for happened. The experts decided, on the spot, to write down what they’d agreed on. No one commissioned it and no one managed it. The Eindhoven Declaration emerged from the room because, for once, the room existed. Rise4Life didn’t write it. The experts did. The foundation had simply built the space where those voices could finally meet.

These were people who rarely share a table, and when they finally did, they didn’t just talk. They acted. It’s the principle Rise4Life keeps returning to:

We do not wait for the right people to find each other. We build the room where they meet.

What you’d actually be signing

The Declaration is a concrete call, not a feel-good statement. It asks governments, institutions, businesses, communities and ordinary citizens to endorse seven principles and then act on them. The core of it: every child has the right to grow up in a drug-free environment. Prevention comes first, because stopping someone from ever starting is the primary strategy, not the afterthought. Children have the right to be protected from environments that normalise drug use. And international treaties, for all the argument around them, do not recognise a right to use drugs. What they recognise is a child’s right to protection.

The Declaration has been translated into eight languages and carried all the way to the United Nations in Vienna through OVOM, One Voice One Message, the international coalition that stewards it. Through OVOM, Rise4Life connects to organisations, parents’ platforms, scientific committees, legal advisors and prevention networks across multiple continents.

The 2027 deadline nobody’s watching

OVOM ran a side event at CND 69 in Vienna in March 2026, bluntly titled “Rights of the Drug User vs Rights of the Child,” and the Declaration was distributed on the floor of the UN. The next session, CND 70 in March 2027, is bigger. The global drug policy framework is under review, and that session will present progress on an independent expert review of the entire global drug control system. The people doing this work call it the most consequential window they’ve operated in. Every signature gathered before then strengthens a single argument: the world has not forgotten Article 33.

How a right disappears

Article 33 isn’t being abolished. That would be too visible, too easy to fight. What’s happening is quieter. Powerful forces within the UN system are pushing to reinterpret it, to sign it with one hand and hollow it out with the other. Under the banner of harm reduction, the child’s right to a drug-free environment is being pushed aside. The user’s right to use is winning. The child’s right to be protected is losing.

The words stay the same. The language of the right remains on the page while the meaning underneath it drains away. That is how rights disappear in international politics. Not through a vote to scrap them, but through slow redefinition, while almost nobody is watching.

This should sit uneasily with anyone who cares about bouncing back. We have spent years, rightly, trying to strip the shame out of addiction and make it easier to ask for help. That work matters. But there’s a cost we rarely name. When something starts to sound ordinary, the urgency around it fades, and the warning signs stop reading as warnings. A child’s right to protection can be worn away at the edges while everyone insists the right itself is perfectly intact.

What your name actually does

Numbers translate directly into a mandate. More signatures mean Rise4Life and OVOM speak with more authority at international forums, with demonstrable public backing when the conversation reaches governments, and as a visible counter-voice to a normalisation narrative that mostly goes unanswered. Every signature is one person saying, plainly, that this deserves protection.

You can add yours in about thirty seconds at rise4life.eu/declaration. It costs nothing. In a year the people closest to this work keep calling the most important they’ve had, it’s one of the few small things that might tip the scale.