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Professor Stephen P. Marks, Harvard Professor Emeritus, Joins Action on Smoking and Health Board of Trustees
Esteemed Leadership and Wisdom will help Address Tobacco as a Human Rights Concern
WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 3, 2022 – Action on Smoking and Health (ASH US) is pleased to welcome Professor Stephen P. Marks to its Board of Trustees. Dr. Marks’s extensive experience in human rights, international law, and public health aligns with ASH’s human rights-informed policy work, making him an ideal advisor to help ASH accelerate its work to reach zero deaths from tobacco.
Professor Marks is the François-Bagnoud Professor of Health and Human Rights Emeritus, having served for 23 years in the Department of Global Health and Population at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He taught courses at Harvard Chan and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences until his retirement in June 2022, when he took up his functions as professor and founding dean of the Jindal School of Public Health and Human Development at O.P. Jindal Global University in India.
Recently, Professor Marks’s research focused on the right to health, global health governance, integrating human rights into sustainable human development; mental health; poverty; tobacco control; and the right to development. He has published recent books, articles or book chapters in each of these areas. His earlier work has dealt with biotechnology and human rights; impunity for mass atrocities; terrorism and human rights; cultural rights; access to medicines, and human rights education.
Before moving to Harvard in 1999, Professor Marks had an impressive career working at Columbia University, The Asia Foundation in Cambodia, Princeton University, the United Nations in Cambodia and New York, NY, the MacArthur Foundation, Cardozo School of Law, the American Society of International Law, Academic Council on the United Nations System, the Ford Foundation, UNESCO, and the International Institute of Human Rights.
Professor Marks’s expertise in human rights is extensive and will strengthen ASH’s cutting-edge approaches to using human rights mechanisms to strengthen tobacco control policy and bring about the end of the tobacco epidemic. Professor Marks stands with ASH in considering the production, marketing and sale of tobacco products a human rights violation that the international community must immediately remedy.
Cigarettes are the only consumer product that kills when used exactly as their manufacturer intends, causing more than 8 million preventable deaths every year. Governments should consider holding the tobacco industry criminally liable for the harm they cause as well as taking steps to phase cigarettes out of the market.
Ending the completely preventable tobacco epidemic is a human rights and development challenge that the world CAN overcome this century.
ACTION ON SMOKING AND HEALTH
Founded in 1967, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) is America’s oldest anti-tobacco organization, dedicated to a world with ZERO tobacco deaths. Because tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death worldwide, ASH supports bold solutions proportionate to the magnitude of the problem. ash.org
