Section 28 of the Dangerous Drugs Act 2000 provides for imprisonment of up to 25 years for cannabis cultivation. The 81-year-old plaintiff before the Supreme Court of Mauritius is being deprived of his liberty — his freedom from imprisonment — for cultivating a plant in his own home for his own medical relief. The plant harms no one outside his own person. The deprivation of liberty is proportional to a harm that does not exist.

The right to liberty under Article 3 is not absolute. States may restrict liberty for legitimate purposes. The question the UDHR framework poses is whether the state's purpose — preventing an 81-year-old from growing a medicinal plant privately — is legitimate, necessary, and proportionate. The South African Constitutional Court in Minister of Justice v Prince (2018) found an equivalent restriction disproportionate. The Ah Seek judgment found the colonial criminal prohibition on private consensual behaviour disproportionate. The UDHR Article 3 argument follows the same chain of reasoning.

The question of whether a 25-year sentence for private medical cannabis cultivation constitutes cruel and inhuman punishment requires a proportionality assessment. International human rights jurisprudence has consistently applied proportionality tests to criminal penalties: the severity of the sentence must bear a rational relationship to the gravity of the harm caused.

The criminal sentence available under the DDA 2000 for cannabis cultivation — up to 25 years — is equivalent to the sentencing range available for violent crimes including serious assault and manslaughter in many jurisdictions. Cannabis cultivation causes no physical harm to any other person. It has caused zero recorded deaths in all of documented medical history. The endocannabinoid system that processes the plant's compounds is present in every human body and is produced naturally by the body itself. A penalty of 25 years for the personal cultivation of a substance that the human body is biologically designed to receive and that has killed no one is, on its face, a proportionality argument with significant force under Article 5.

This is the strongest article in the UDHR case against cannabis prohibition. Article 12 guarantees freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy and home. The South African Constitutional Court grounded its 2018 decision striking down private cannabis prohibition explicitly in the right to privacy: what adults choose to do in private, that does not harm others, falls within the constitutionally protected sphere of private autonomy.

The 81-year-old plaintiff's case before the Supreme Court of Mauritius is premised on exactly this argument. His cultivation occurs in his own home. His use is personal. It harms no one outside himself. The state's intrusion into that private space — with a potential sentence of 25 years — must, under Article 12, be justified as non-arbitrary. The state must demonstrate that its interference is not arbitrary: that it serves a legitimate purpose, that it is proportionate to that purpose, and that there is no less intrusive means of achieving the same result. The pharmacological evidence that there is no harm to others from private cannabis use makes the non-arbitrary justification structurally difficult to sustain.

Article 25 establishes the right to medical care as a fundamental human right. The Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act 2022 was passed specifically to create a medical cannabis access framework for patients in Mauritius. It was passed because the Mauritian parliament acknowledged that cannabis has medical value — the act of passing it constitutes a legislative recognition of the right to access it as medicine. The amendment has not been proclaimed. Medical cannabis access does not legally exist for any Mauritian patient.

The tension with Article 25 is therefore precise: the state has legislatively acknowledged that cannabis is medicine. It has simultaneously declined to make that medicine accessible. The 81-year-old plaintiff who cultivates the plant in his own home to access the medical relief the legislature acknowledged he should have access to is, under Article 25, asserting a right that the Mauritian parliament already voted to recognise. The executive non-proclamation of the 2022 amendment is the barrier between the Article 25 right and its practical exercise. The Supreme Court is being asked to close that gap from the judicial side.

Article 27 establishes the right to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. The scientific record on cannabis is among the most extensive in modern pharmacology. The endocannabinoid system was discovered in 1992. The retrograde signalling mechanism was mapped in the 2000s. The neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids were confirmed and patented by the United States government in 2003 (US Patent 6,630,507). The FDA approved cannabis-derived Epidiolex for paediatric epilepsy in 2018. The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs voted in 2020 to remove cannabis from its most restrictive schedule on the basis of the WHO's scientific review.

Mauritius's prohibition framework — maintained in its current carceral form with a 25-year maximum sentence — denies its citizens the benefit of this documented scientific advancement. A Mauritian diabetic patient with neuropathy cannot access the treatment that peer-reviewed science has documented as effective for their condition. A Mauritian cancer patient cannot access the anti-nausea medication that the FDA approved in synthetic form as Marinol and Cesamet. The state is not merely refusing to legalise a recreational substance. It is actively denying its citizens the benefit of scientific advances that their own body's endocannabinoid system is biologically designed to receive. Article 27 frames this as a human rights question, not merely a policy preference.