 The UNGAS, the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs, in 2016 came out with an outcome document and on the basis of that political process, UN agencies were asked to sit together and come up with a UN joint common position related to drugs. This was done in 2018, it was published at the high level meeting last year at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the importance of this document is that 32 UN agencies formed a task team and looked into the key issues outlined in the UNGAS outcome document and looked at what we have learned over the last decades with regard to how we have addressed the drug problem. The common position talks about the importance of moving forward towards decriminalization of people who use drugs and also greater consistency and support for a human rights approach to people who use drugs and public health approaches in the context especially of HIV prevention treatment care and support for people who use drugs. This is the only way we're going to change this epidemic, the epidemic of HIV amongst people who use drugs. While global HIV incidence is going down amongst most populations and the number of total new HIV infections in the world is reducing every year, we don't see that in the case of people who use drugs. In fact we see the opposite, we're going in the wrong direction and this is an urgent public health emergency that really needs a new approach and the UN common position is one of the key tools we have to move this forward. Data and experiences clearly demonstrate that so-called action or punitive action or war on drugs has failed and is not the solution to drug problem. The harmful consequences of such approach are deep and far-reaching. More violence, more human rights violation, abuses and public health failure. The common position provided several direction of action including developing and implementing policies centered on people, health and human rights, shifting drug policies and intervention towards public health approach, ensuring respect for human dignity and human rights for those who use drugs in all aspect of drug and social policies and ensuring equal access to public services including housing, healthcare, education for individuals who use drugs. A lot of the recommendations that WHO has made over the years with regard to health, with regard to harm reduction, with regard to access to medicine for palliative care and medical care. A lot of these issues are now mentioned in this UN joint common position. So this is an important document that can be used to advocate with countries to implement the position and the recommendations made with regard to health. The idea that the UN system as a whole and from the side of the agencies and the entities can come together under one sort of common position on drug policy and the best practices and principles on drug policy is really important. And as civil society we very much welcome it. It's been something we've been calling for for a long time. We know that criminalising people who use drugs has been very detrimental to their health and has created barriers to them accessing healthcare services and drives stigma and discrimination against them, which is very harmful. Some countries that perhaps do not agree with the decriminalisation of drug use are pushing back against the common position. And I think that that is problematic really because the UN is there to provide normative guidance to member states and has a mandate to do so. Now the main argument that has been used by a number of countries in objection to the common position is that they think it sort of undermines the primary role of the CND as the UN policymaking body and that the task team creates a parallel mechanism that infringes on the leading roles of the INCB and UNODC. And in our view, instead of creating a parallel mechanism or undermining Vienna mandates, the common position and task team represent a necessary and long overdue correction to bring the Vienna-based entities back into the UN family. So we call also with the briefing paper on member states to actively support the work of the task team, to defend references to it in resolutions here at CND, but also to keep promoting that drug-related issues appear on the agenda of other UN forums, including General Assembly, EcoSOC, World Health Assembly, Human Rights Council, etc. And to assure that all relevant UN entities, including UNODC, actively promote the UN common position.