Informe de actividades del IDPC para el período 2024-2024

El IDPC refleja los esfuerzos colectivos de la red por conseguir un mundo en el que las respuestas al consumo, cultivo, producción y suministro de drogas se basen en el bienestar, la solidaridad, la evidencia y la compasión. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

2023 marked the end of our Strategic Plan for 2021-2023. To reflect on the progress we have made over that time, this Progress Report offers an overview of our key activities and impacts since 2021, focusing on the five priority themes we had identified in our Strategic Plan. We will also highlight specific wins from the past year: decriminalisation and criminal justice reforms, drug policy impacts on women, the Support. Don’t Punish campaign, cross-UN involvement and coherence, and protecting civil society space.

The ongoing criminalisation of people who use drugs remains a significant barrier to social justice and human rights. Criminalisation underpins a repressive approach and a so-called ‘war on drugs’, yet fuels health harms (most recently a global overdose crisis) and exacerbates inequalities and stigma. Yet over the past three years, the decriminalisation of drug use and related activities has continued to gather momentum – both in terms of international normative support and country-level reform. IDPC’s network identified this as a key strategic priority for 2021-2023 and again for the 2024-2027 period – demonstrating its importance for the movement as a whole.

Over this time, IDPC has delivered a wide range of tools, resources and actions to help promote a ‘Gold Standard’ model of decriminalisation. Although this model has yet to be fully realised, it represents the culmination of the IDPC network’s long-term research and expertise on decriminalisation. Under the Strategic Plan 2021-2023, IDPC released a Decriminalisation Advocacy Guide (in English and Spanish), outlining our positions and messaging including the articulation of our ‘Gold Standard’. Since 2021, IDPC has also worked with a coalition of expert partners to deliver a flagship Drug Decriminalisation eCourse – with seven interactive and open access modules now freely available in English, Arabic, French and Russian. In 2024, the eCourse reached 1,000 individual users from more than 100 countries around the world, and the feedback continues to be overwhelmingly positive. IDPC has also continued to update and maintain a Decriminalisation World Map in partnership with Talking Drugs / Release and the Drug Policy Alliance. This has helped to track the growth of this response – from 46 jurisdictions in 2020 to 60 at the time of writing.

What we have achieved this year

Further to the increase in jurisdictions adopting decriminalisation models – with reforms noted in Luxembourg, the Australian Capital Territory, the US states of Minnesota, Missouri and Ohio, and British Columbia in Canada over the past 12 months – there has continued to be a groundswell of high-level support for this evidence- and rights-based approach. Building on the foundations laid by the UN common positions on drugs (2018) and incarceration (2021) and the Global AIDS Strategy 2021-2026, normative endorsements for the decriminalisation of drugs continued throughout 2023 and 2024.

In March 2023, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) launched its 8th March Principles including a clear statement that the law must not proscribe drug use or related behaviours. Later that month, IDPC played a central role in advocating for, negotiating, and then analysing and disseminating Human Rights Council Resolution 52/24 on ‘the human rights implications of drug policy’ which called upon governments ‘to consider alternatives to incarceration, conviction and punishment’. The resolution also mandated the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to release a report in time for the high-level segment of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in March 2024. The report is one of the strongest compendiums to date of the damage caused by drug policies, and the need for comprehensive reforms and progressive alternatives. In the report, the OHCHR concluded that ‘If effectively designed and implemented, decriminalisation can be a powerful instrument to ensure that the rights of people who use drugs are protected’. Going beyond decriminalisation, the OHCHR’s report calls on Member States to consider responsible regulation and to ‘review convictions and/or sentences and, where appropriate, quash, commute or reduce convictions and/or sentences’.

Informe de actividades del IDPC para el período 2024-2024

What we have achieved this year

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