Combatir el racismo sistémico en la aplicación de las leyes sobre drogas: Contribución de la sociedad civil al EMLER de la ONU

IDPC y organizaciones socias de la sociedad civil destacan las profundas desigualdades raciales en la aplicación de las leyes sobre drogas, instando a reformas para desmantelar el daño y la discriminación sistémicos. Más información, en inglés, está disponible abajo.

The co-submitting civil society organisations welcome the upcoming report of the Expert Mechanism on ‘Systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent in the enforcement of drug laws and policies’, which will be presented at the 63rd session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Following more than a century of prohibition and decades of the so-called war on drugs, the global drug market is more robust, dynamic and diverse than ever, levels of drug use have consistently increased, and supply has not been disrupted in any meaningful or lasting way. Even more problematically, punitive drug control has produced an unmitigated human rights disaster.

To date, UN Member States have been highly reluctant to address racial discrimination in global drug control, and this is not an oversight. It is because racial discrimination in drug policy is not a side effect; it is part of its very foundation.

From the very beginning, global drug control systems were shaped by racialised fears, colonial interests, and efforts to control certain populations. Substances became criminalised not solely because of their harms, but because of who was associated with them.

These narratives were codified into laws and exported globally through colonial and geopolitical power. This system underpins and upholds structural racism across the world.

Recommendations

We encourage EMLER to highlight the following conclusions and recommendations in its upcoming report:

• Recognise that racial disparities in drug law enforcement are the product of systems that were designed – or have evolved – to produce these outcomes. Addressing racial discrimination in drug law enforcement therefore requires far-reaching structural reforms.
• Prior consultation in drug policy decision-making: Any drug policy measure affecting ethnic territories – including eradication, interdiction, or enforcement operations – must be subject to free, prior and informed consent processes with Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities. EMLER should urge States to ensure that drug policy reforms are designed and implemented in full consultation with the communities most affected by both illicit economies and punitive enforcement.
• Question and condemn the “narcoterrorism” narrative as an attempt at imposing exceptional regimes that erode human rights and the rule of law, with disproportionate impacts on Africans and people of African descent.
• The decriminalisation of drug use and related activities is a key step towards preventing the over-policing and overcriminalisation of Africans and people of African descent for drug offences. However, it must be accompanied by explicit anti-discrimination safeguards, independent oversight and mandatory collection of data disaggregated by race and ethnicity to avoid racialised enforcement under a new label (whereby police discretion and the imposition of fine might continue to overwhelmingly target Africans and people of African descent).
• Responsible legal regulation is also an essential step towards redressing some of the worst harms of prohibition, and is now a policy option promoted by OHCHR, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health. However, here again, any reform must be designed with racial equity as an explicit goal, rather than as an afterthought. Evidence of jurisdictions where cannabis has already been legalised shows that, as legal cannabis markets open up, large commercial actors — often majority-white owned businesses — have tended to consolidate market share at the expense of those who have paid the heaviest price under prohibition: crowding out small farmers and community producers who have cultivated these plants for generations, while sidelining those in socio-economic vulnerability traditionally involved in low-level dealing before regulation. Furthermore, the failure to expunge criminal records for activities now legally regulated has automatically excluded those most harshly affected by punitive drug policy from the legal market. Racial equity in legal regulation means actively preventing these outcomes — through licensing frameworks, market access provisions, and reparative economic policies that prioritise most affected communities.
• Sentence review and conviction expungement for past drug offences must be understood as a racial justice imperative, not a technical legal question.
• As the UN drug control system is undergoing a review by a panel of independent experts (established by CND Resolution 68/6), we urge EMLER to seek a formal engagement with the panel. This multidisciplinary body, composed of 19 experts, has been tasked with producing actionable recommendations to strengthen the international drug control system and its implementation. If that review is to have any credibility, it must grapple seriously with the racialised foundations and outcomes of the very system it is examining. A formal dialogue between EMLER and the panel would send a powerful signal of UN system coherence, and ensure that racial justice is not once again sidelined at the critical moment when the drug control system is being asked to account for itself.