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Racial profiling and drugs: the United Nations reprimand Italy
A new report by the UN Human Rights Council experts on racial justice in law enforcement denounces racial profiling by law enforcement in Italy, and asks the country to fully decriminalise the possession for personal use and ‘retail-level trade’ in drugs.
Yesterday the report of the Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) of the Council of Europe received wide attention, today Italian civil society brings to the attention of public opinion the report on Italy of the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Promote Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement established by the United Nations Human Rights Council.
In previous reports, the UN group of experts had already clearly identified repressive drug policies as a key tool for the perpetuation of institutional racism, joining many UN agencies and experts and civil society worldwide. This worrying dynamic has been confirmed in relation to Italy, where punitive drug policies, combined with racial profiling by law enforcement, raises – in the words of the experts – “significant human rights concerns and disproportionately affects Africans and people of African descent.” The Mechanism paints a clear while dramatic picture of the violence and opacity, of the ineffectiveness of these policies – which in fact favor drug trafficking, rather than combating it – and of the consequences of this punitive approach not only on minorities, but also on society and on institutions, including prisons.
“We had just read the very critical report towards Italy from the UN Mechanism for overcoming racism in law enforcement and in the judicial system, when the same alarm was also sounded by ECRI, the anti-racism body of the Council of Europe” comments Susanna Ronconi, international affairs chief of Forum Droghe. “And the issues raised are the same: racial profiling, discrimination, over-representation of foreigners among those arrested, charged and incarcerated. Also worrying is the emphasis, common to both reports, on the difficulties in monitoring and denouncing acts of racism, and the lack of real autonomy and effectiveness of the national bodies that should guarantee rights. The problem does not appear to concern individual cases of racism, the problem is systemic, structural and political.”
Grazia Zuffa, president of La Societa’ della Ragione, underlines how “the report describes exhausted prisons, overcrowded due to policies blind to evidence, in which a very high number of people are incarcerated for drugs – a third of them foreigners – and experiences drug dependence but is denied access to essential harm reduction services.”
According to Giada Girelli, Harm Reduction International, “the Mechanism offers useful recommendations to the Italian government on how to start dismantling this system – such as to adopt drug policies in line with human rights, including by decriminalizing small-scale dealing and creating truly accessible harm reduction and drug treatment services. In doing so, it joins the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which had also recently urged Italy to review its drug policies; and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The government should embrace these recommendations, which outline a possible and urgent path towards more effective and human rights-respecting drug policies. Unfortunately, the only answer seems to be yet another tightening of penalties for drug crimes.”
Leonardo Fiorentini, secretary of Forum Droghe, concludes: “in the same days in which the Meloni Government tries to bend national and international law to its own toxic propaganda on migrants, it is important to reaffirm a truth. That is, what human rights conventions require are not abstract principles, but must be translated into compliant laws and policies. It is essential to build a social and political perspective that moves the next Parliament to intervene; not only by canceling the laws emerged from this Melonian punitive populism, but also by dismantling those legal, political and human disasters that form the tools of institutional racism, namely the Jervolino-Vassalli and and Bossi-Fini laws.”
Rome, 23 October 2024