This Congress urges government to allocate considerably higher funding for prevention (not including prohibition) and treatment of alcohol and other drug dependencies.

IHEU Regional Congress, Australia, November 2000

It is recommended that Humanists should donate organs after death and blood while alive, for the benefit of other people.

General Assembly, Mumbai, 15 January 1999

The International Humanist & Ethical Union

* Noting that the United Nations in its charter declares the dignity and worth of the human person and the equal rights of men and women;

The conditions in the biosphere, with its extremely thin skin around the Earth, have changed in geological times, allowing different forms of life and exterminating some of these forms is later periods.

Humans must avoid being themselves the cause of alterations in conditions in the biosphere that will make present forms of life impossible.

Humanists accept the full responsibility for their own life style and the influence they have on their environment, including fellow humans and other forms of life, now and for the future.

The Board of the IHEU has approved the following statement on AIDS policy:

1. From an ethical point of view a policy should not only be judged by its intentions but also by its consequences, intended or otherwise.

2. Generalising about groups at risk is unjustified and also contrary to the principle of non-discrimination laid down in national and international laws. Moreover, recent research has shown that it is not so much a matter of groups at risk as well as of behaviour at risk.

The International Humanist & Ethical Union, assembled at its 8th World Congress on "Anti-Humanist Trends: Challenge and Response" in Hanover, Federal Republic of Germany, August 1-5, 1982,

* Emphasises that patients of mental hospitals are entitled to all fundamental human rights including the right to choose or refuse medical treatment, and that in dealing with exceptions to this statement of principle the patient’s own will should remain the most important guideline;