Why the press was wrong about changing drug laws based on human rights

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Why the press was wrong about changing drug laws based on human rights

27 August 2015

By Jack Sommers

A landmark report by politicians, calling for a more liberal drug regime based on human rights, had one detail that attracted particular attention.

"Junkies could use privacy law to avoid jail," was one headline for a story that suggested our drug law could be at an end. A prominent MP predicted it could "open the floodgates" and lead to drug users challenging their prosecutions and winning.

This was in reaction to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on drugs reform's new guidance, which suggested, among other things, legal challenges to prosecutions for drug possession or growing small amounts for personal use, using Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which covers the right to privacy and family life, as merely using a drug does not "injure other people's rights either directly or indirectly and therefore should not be criminalised".

MP Keith Vaz, chairman of parliament's Home Affairs Select Committee, condemned this in the pages of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph. "One exemption, though minor, could open the floodgates. Human rights legislation is not designed to be used in this way," he was quoted as saying by both papers, combining two issues that aggravate the right-wing press - liberalised drug regimes and human rights law creeping into different aspects of life - into one quote. "Critics say that, in effect, the Human Rights Act is capable of trumping all other legislation," the Mail article added.But lawyers told The Huffington Post UK that, despite such warnings, claims human rights law could "open the floodgates" for people challenging prosecutions were far-fetched.

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