The UN's top official on health rights called Tuesday for the decriminalization of drug use and an end to forced drug rehabilitation camps in Asia. The camps amount to "keeping sick people jailed," said Anand Grover, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health at a conference on international health rights in Hanoi.

Anand Grover (unaids.org)

Grover denounced the practice of many Asian nations, including China, India, Malaysia, and Vietnam, of forcing drug users to detoxify in massive drug treatment camps. The Open Society Institute reports that more than 50,000 people are being held in such camps in Vietnam and as many as 350,000 in China.

Grover elaborated on his decriminalization remarks in a Tuesday interview with Radio Australia. Remarking on the battle to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, Grover said: "Well, you know the success in Asia has been by being able to protect and empower the communities of sex workers, drug users and men having sex with men. But ultimately their rights are not being protected because their right to health is being compromised by, for example, large numbers of drug users who because possession and consumption is illegal in most countries find themselves in either compulsory treatment centers or voluntary treatment centers where it's not the evidence-based treatment which is actually resorted to, but old detoxification, which has a huge relapse rate, and they're subjected to a large number of abuses throughout the region, including in India for instance where NGOs run the centers and they're totally unregulated. And people will end up dying later on."

Grover clarified that he was not talking about legalizing the drug trade. "It's not the drug trade that we want to decriminalize," he said. "I think that large numbers of people who are just simple drug users they find themselves being treated as criminals and their rights abused."