IDPC

Publications

Results 3517 to 3528 of 3893
20 April 2010

Report from the UN Special Rapporteur on torture on abuse of prisoners and detainees

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 ...'
20 April 2010

In rehabilitation's name? Ending institutionalised cruelty and degrading treatment of people who use drugs

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.
20 April 2010

IHRA, Open Society Institute and Human Rights Watch - Briefs on human rights and drug policy

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.
20 April 2010

Effect of Drug Law Enforcement on Drug-Related Violence: Evidence from a Scientific Review

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.
20 April 2010

Remembering people who use drugs on World TB Day

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.
17 April 2010

The UK Drug Interventions Programme

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.
29 March 2010

Burnet Institute Report - Harm reduction in Asia: Progress towards universal access to harm reduction services among people who inject drugs

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.
25 March 2010

TTAG Policy Brief - 'Illuminating a hidden Epidemic: The Public Health Crisis of HIV/HCV Co-infection Among Injecting Drug Users in Thailand'

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.
24 March 2010

Drugs control is leading to human rights abuses, says LSE study

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.
24 March 2010

IDPC Policy Briefing - Arms trafficking from the United States to Mexico: Divergent responsibilities

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.
24 March 2010

Europe and drug policies: Italian propaganda ends up in a fiasco

This article published in Il Manifesto criticizes Italy's position on the concept of harm reduction. Whereas the concept is now well accepted at the European level, Italy has taken the position to adopt the term, but to impose its own definition of it via a list of 'acceptable' and 'non-acceptable' interventions. This was followed by intense propaganda in Italy, wrongly stating that the European Union had accepted the Italian views on harm reduction.