IHRA, in co-operation with international and national partners, has submitted information on four out of the five countries up for review at the forthcoming 44th session of the UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights: Kazakhstan, Mauritius, Afghanistan and Colombia.
With only a few months to go before his mandate expires, Nowak has produced a global study for the Human Rights Council detailing his experiences and major concerns and one of the most troubling, he says, is the condition of prisoners, those who have been sentenced and those yet to be charged and tried. The detainees described in the report are from the most disadvantaged corners of society – the poor, minorities, drug users or aliens and right at the bottom of the prison hierarchy itself, children, the elderly, persons with disabilities and diseases, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and trans-gender persons. These people, Nowak says, suffer double or triple discrimination ...'
This new report from the Open Society Institute documents low-threshold methadone and buprenorphine programs—that is, programs that seek, in the spirit of harm reduction, to meet patients “where they’re at” and minimize bureaucratic requirements.
The UN’s World Drug Day on June 26th is also the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. While coincidental, the conjunction is unfortunately apt. Across the world, whether the result of police apprehension, diversion to treatment as an alternative to incarceration, or involuntary commitment under health statutes or at the request of family members, people who use drugs are subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading practices, many of which rise to the level of torture. These breaches of international law are often conducted in the name of law enforcement or in facilities run by police or military personnel; this highlights the difficulty, and importance, of protecting the rights of criminalised groups in state custody, of whom drug users are almost always the most numerous. Because the so-called health services are so often abusive detention by another name, honest examination of what has been allowed to pass as drug treatment requires that we challenge the notion of “treatment failure,” examining treatment systems more closely rather than unreflectively attributing blame to the individuals within them.
Coinciding with the 2010 UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, the International Harm Reduction Association, the Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch, created a series of fact sheets on the human rights implications of anti-drug policies and practices. These briefings address serious human rights abuses that result from drug control efforts, including torture and ill treatment by police, mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, and denial of essential medicines and basic health services.
Based on the available English language scientific evidence, the results of this systematic review suggest that an increase in drug law enforcement interventions to disrupt drug markets is unlikely to reduce violence attributable to drug gangs.
Instead, from an evidence-based public policy perspective and based on several decades of available data, the existing evidence strongly suggests that drug law enforcement contributes to gun violence and high homicide rates and that increasingly sophisticated methods of disrupting Canadian gangs involved in drug distribution could unintentionally increase violence. In this context, and since drug prohibition has not achieved its stated goal of reducing drug supply, alternative models for drug control may need to be considered if drug-related violence is to be meaningfully reduced.
Worldwide, over 1 million people die from TB each year. It is one of the biggest killers of people living with HIV. People who inject drugs and people in prisons are disproportionately affected by this curable disease, and remain less likely than the general population to have access to TB diagnosis and treatment.
The Drug Interventions Programme is a key part of the government's strategy for tackling drugs and reducing crime. And it's working: acquisitive crime - to which drug-related crime makes a substantial contribution - has fallen by almost a third since the programme started and record numbers of people are being helped with their drug misuse.
In 2009 the UN Regional Task Force (RTF) commissioned an update of the Baseline Assessment of Policies, Resources and Services for Injecting Drug Users which was originally published in 2006 and covered 15 countries in South and South East Asia. The update survey, conducted by the Burnet Institute, consists of a desk review of available data and information about national programme support, including legal and policy context, barriers to scale up and programme implementation, and availability of services.
The Thai AIDS Treatment Action Group (TTAG) developed a policy brief, "Illuminating a Hidden Epidemic: The Public Health Crisis of HIV/HCV Co-infection Among Injecting Drug Users (IDU) in Thailand," which will also be adapted to the regional level in collaboration with Indian, Chinese and Indonesian activists. TTAG's brief, published in Thai and English, will be available on TTAG's website in April.
The paper, 'Narcophobia: drugs prohibition and the generation of human rights abuses', appears in the March edition of Trends In Organized Crime. It examines the history of the drug trade - from the 18th Century when opium was traded as a valuable commodity by, among others, the British, Dutch and Portugese governments - to the modern day in which the United Nations has adopted international treaties against drug trafficking.
Arms trafficking from the USA to Mexico is a central issue in bilateral relations, closely linked to drug trafficking and, in particular, the lethal violence unleashed by Mexican drug trafficking organisations. Drug traffickers are obtaining increasingly sophisticated weapons at reasonably low prices thanks to easy access to guns in the US market. As with drug trafficking, gun smuggling implies a relationship of co-responsibility between supplier and consuming countries.