Video 7: How the human rights framework and the drug control framework interact

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Del curso dictado por University of Geneva

Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health

4 calificaciones

University of Geneva

Drugs, drug use, drug policy and health

4 calificaciones

This MOOC is the first of its kind, since it addresses critical issues related to drugs from a multidisciplinary, health and human rights-based approach. Throughout the course you will cover a range of questions including what are drugs and why they controlled? What are the benefits and harms of taking drugs? How public health policies can address drug use? You will also learn about the intricacies of the international drug control framework and the negative consequences of widespread prohibitionist drug policies around the world. Finally, you will examine ways of furthering drug policy reform. The topics will be presented by over 40 speakers from scientific, academic and institutional backgrounds, spokespersons of civil society as well as people who use drugs presenting their views. By the end of the course you will have: - a strong understanding of the major health issues related to drug use and drug policy; - a clear vision of why drug policy is debated today; - and, if you so wish, you will be equipped to engage in the drug policy reform movement at your local or regional level.

De la lección

Module 4: Questioning prohibition-based policies

Welcome to Module 4 which looks at questioning prohibition-based policies. In this Module, you will discover that most drug policies in the world are based on prohibition law enforcement and criminalization of drug use ; and see that such policies have a number of negative consequences on people’s health as well as on their human rights. This Module will also look at law enforcement more closely and reveal how it can cooperate to improve health. You will learn about the human rights framework and the drug control framework and see what human rights violations, stemming from the implementation of prohibitionist drug policies, look like around the world. Finally, you will also see that drug policies are connected to development and the environment, most often not in a good way, with prohibition fueling violence, crime and corruption and impeding development. By the end of this Module you will be able to: • Evaluate the extent to which prohibition-based policies have succeeded or failed in reducing drug production, trafficking and consumption; • Describe the negative impacts of prohibition-based policies on health, human rights and development; • Recall how prohibition-based policies fuel organized crime and trafficking. We hope this week will provide you with valuable insight into the reality of prohibitionist drug policies, for people in communities all over the world ; and help you see what have been the consequences of these policies, in terms of their impact on human rights, health and development. We also hope you enjoy the essential reading and optional additional resources we have prepared for you. Best wishes,The Drugs, Drug Use, Drug Policy and Health team

Video 7: How the human rights framework and the drug control framework interact12:00

Video 8: Prohibitionist drug policies: violations of human rights9:11

Video 9: Prohibitionist drug policies: violations of human rights of women who use drugs14:06

Video 10: A closer look at drug policies in Asia – the limits of extremity in drug policy8:41

Video 11: Violations of human rights in Central America and South America6:10

Video 12: Prohibitionist law enforcement drug policies negatively impact development and the environment6:46

Video 13: Prohibition fuels violence, crime and corruption9:24

Video 14: How prohibition fuels violence, crime and corruption: the situation in Central America6:37

Video 15: How drug law enforcement affects drug markets5:55

Conoce a los instructores

Michel Kazatchkine
Senior Fellow
Global Health Center, Graduate Institute for International Affairs and Development, Geneva
Barbara Broers
Professor (in Addiction Medicine)
Community Health Departement, Geneva University Hospitals
Aymeric Reyre
Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Medicine, Paris 13 University
Jennifer Hasselgard-Rowe
Researcher and Lecturer
Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva

I'd like to introduce you to the International Human Rights System.

In an earlier video,

you will have seen and I hopefully,

you will have read about the development of the International Drug Control Regime.

It's important to realize that that doesn't sit on its own in

the international system and that

lots of different legal regimes have built up over time.

For this section, the most important for us is the human rights system,

which developed in parallel to the drug control system.

By parallel I mean,

parallel they didn't really connect such that

human rights principles don't come into the drug control treaties.

I would encourage you to read the drug control treaties.

It's surprising how many people study

drug policy or work in drug policy and haven't read them.

It's good to read through them.

It can be a bit boring but it's well worth doing.

The human rights system developed as people may know in the wake of World War II.

It developed started with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 but from that,

we developed many binding human rights treaties.

Two of the most important are called the Covenant and Civil and Political

Rights and the Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights.

These made legally binding a lot of the standards that were in the Universal Declaration.

They also well-worth reading.

From then, there are a number of thematic treaties for example on torture,

on children's rights, on women's rights,

on racial discrimination and all of these have application for drug control.

So, it's worth looking at this the international legal regime,

all of these treaties can be read online and there's lots of writings about them.

The parallel development of these systems really only came

together with activists and NGOs bringing them together to

say there is a relationship between

international drug control law and

international human rights law and we need to unpack those relationships.

I'd like to introduce you to one a way of doing that,

which is three different interactions

between international drug control law and international human rights law.

I'll call these complementarities,

places where they share their goals,

tensions, which I'll explain in more detail, and conflicts, okay?

An example of a complementarity would be access to essential controlled medicines.

In human rights law we have a concept of the right to health,

the right to the highest attainable standard of health in fact,

and a part of that is access to essential medicines.

So, here you can see a complimentary norm on

the drug control side and on the human rights side.

Now, you will have seen in an earlier video,

I trust that there are problems with access to essential controlled medicines.

But here, the right to health can bolster and provide

a human rights support to that aspect of the drug control regime.

Now, tensions are a bit different.

This is where states have obligations in drug control law to do things at national level,

to do things on the ground.

In the implementation of those obligations,

human rights problems can arise.

So, an example of a tension would be something like crop eradication.

The obligations to eradicate,

say for example, cannabis plants or the coca plant.

The way that's carried out can carry considerable human rights risks,

but it doesn't mean that the requirement

to do so is automatically a conflict with human rights.

But there are examples of direct conflicts where

human rights law and current drug control requirements

in the international system can't really co-exist.

I would argue that one of those is the ban on

certain indigenous and cultural practices in

the Single Convention on narcotic drugs of 1981.

Since the 1960, international law around

cultural rights and indigenous rights has increase significantly.

The kind of ban on those practices that was

put in place in the 60s and really agreed earlier than that,

likely would not pass today.

It would likely breach what are now

considered longstanding norms around free prior and informed

consent of indigenous peoples but also the right to

practice your culture under the covenant on civil and political rights.

So, those are three ways of looking at the relationship between these two legal regimes.

You can look for the complementarities and try and maximize those.

You can look for the conflicts and discuss the ways

that one of these systems has to change to fix them.

You can look at the tensions and you can use

international legal methods to resolve those tensions in favor of human rights.

I'd like to talk in this video about a debate around

the nature of human rights abuses in relation to drug control.

But let me start by saying this,

in an earlier video I asked you to look at

human rights treaties and again I would advise you to do that,

and once you do it you can pick any human right that you read there

and it can be connected to a problem in drug control very easily.

So, for example, the right to life and the fact that

33 states or territories retained the death penalty for drug offenses.

We can talk about the right to privacy and strip searches in schools for drugs,

or the ban on private behavior, for example.

We can talk about religious freedom and the ban on the use of cannabis by the Rastafiri,

for example, or indigenous rights and the ban on the use of the coca leaf.

We could look at freedom from

arbitrary detention and drug detention centers in Southeast Asia,

or the freedom from cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and the use of

police violence to extort from air to extract information or extort money from suspects.

Of course, the right to health and the denial of

harm reduction services such as needle and syringe programs methadone and so on.

Pretty much any human right you want can be connected to a problem in drug control,

and what's interesting is that for those that argue for

reform and that those that argue against drug law reform,

everybody agrees that these abuses are taking place, nobody denies that.

The nature of the disagreement that I want to talk about is to what

extent drug control laws and

international drug control treaties are part of that problem.

On the one hand, there's the argument goes that, "Well,

this is not a drug control problem,

all of those human rights abuses are

human rights problems that exist in those countries anyway."

So, the death penalty,

well, that's a death penalty problem.

The police violence is an issue of police corruption and

wider criminal justice problems in the country and that drug laws don't cause that.

A lot of states and a few scholars hold to that reasoning.

I don't, I would describe human rights abuses in drug controller as systemic,

not just systematic which they are but systemic.

I want to give two or three main reasons for why I think that's the case,

and why that previous argument I think fails.

The first is that for decades the drug problem or drugs problems,

we should say, has been described as an existential threat.

So, if we look at those treaties again,

the drug control treaties,

or if you listen to any political speech or read general assembly resolutions,

you will see drugs described as a threat to security and a threat to the fabric of

society as a social evil to be combated.

Now, the problem is when you pitch any problem in that way,

then it's very easy to justify repression,

and it's very difficult to follow up with voting public with

measures that seem progressive or somewhat counter-intuitive like harm reduction.

A threat gets followed by law enforcement responses and heavy-handed responses to

protect people from the very threat that was established. That's the first reason.

I think there is a systemic problem,

it's the narrative of drugs.

The second though comes back to the drug control treaties,

and the obligation states have.

Now, I use these a bit as a proxy because

our national drug laws are are widely modeled on that system,

and they adopt the same strategies.

What states are required to do under the current legal regime and

the current theories and strategies of drug control carries inherent human rights risks.

In an earlier video, I called these tensions between the treaty regimes,

but we can call them human rights risks.

So, for example, states have to arrest people.

They have to prosecute them.

They have to punish them in some way via prosecution.

They have to eradicate crops.

They have to seize property.

They have to control people's behaviors

via my own private behavior or religious behaviors or cultural behaviors.

They have to control certain forms of expression via incitement laws and so on.

These are all areas of considerable human rights risks.

If somebody is going to be arrested,

we need to know how that happened or if there

was surveillance used or their privacy issues involved.

If somebody is going to be prosecuted,

we need to know what kind of trial they had or what kind of punishment was meted out.

Again, we can raise the issue of the death penalty.

There is good evidence and we will provide a link for this,

an article that I wrote with my colleagues Rick Lines and Patrick Gallahue,

that the amount of states or the number of states using the death penalty for drugs

increased after the adoption of the drug trafficking convention in 1988.

So, it can't be decoupled from this heavy handed approach,

and that's the second part where I think the systemic argument is stronger.

But it relates to a third one which is that how states measure success in

drug control maps very well onto the kinds of indicators we use for human rights risk.

So, states will measure success,

for example, in the number of successful prosecutions.

While coming back to the example of the death penalty,

if a successful prosecution results in more people on death row or more people executed,

then that is at the same time a success in

drug control and a serious problem in human rights.

Taking the current system,

in fact, at face value,

it should be a success that we have so many imprison for nonviolent drug offenses.

It should be a measure of success but it's not,

it's clearly a horrible human rights problem.

So, that's my argument for why, in brief,

for why I think the human rights abuses in

drug control should be categorized as systemic.

Again, we'll provide another link for a longer article on that.

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