Ending the War on Drugs: A Rights Perspective
For more than fifty years the world has pursued a so-called War on Drugs. Its goal—a world free of illicit use of drugs—has proven elusive: Despite billions of dollars spent, illicit drug use is up and illicit drugs today are cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Moreover, the War on Drugs has had disastrous unintended consequences, fueling the spread of violence, human rights abuses and infectious disease in much of the world. In 2013, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, some of the countries hardest hit, called for a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on drugs arguing that “revising the approach on drugs…can no longer be postponed.” This session will be held in April 2016. In the run-up, Human Rights Watch will be publishing a series of articles that will highlight the consequences for respect and protection of human rights of the War on Drugs.
That’s the vexing question United Nations member states have been grappling with over the past 10 weeks, as they have engaged in intense negotiations over the future of the international response to drugs, in preparation for a UN General Assembly special session in April.
Confronted with the fact that policies pursued over the last 50 years have failed to “eliminate or significantly reduce” illicit drugs, countries are drawing wildly differing conclusions. For some, it is time to try something new; for others, it’s to double down on the criminal law enforcement approach. On opposite sides of this debate are countries like Uruguay – open to legalization and regulation of marijuana – and Russia, which opposes even references to a previously agreed – and spectacularly missed – global goal to reduce drug-related HIV transmission.
Health and human rights are at the center of this polarized debate. The UN drug control conventions were established, along with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Narcotics Control Board, out of concern for the harms drugs can do to the “health and welfare of mankind.” But with a growing body of evidence highlighting the negative impacts on health and human rights of an over reliance on a criminal law enforcement-based response to drugs a critical question has arisen: What does more harm – drugs themselves or the response to them?
In the run-up to the April meeting, Human Rights Watch will publish a series of articles examining the range of serious human rights abuses – from torture and killings in the name of drug control to disproportionate and arbitrary imprisonment of drug users to denying cancer patients access to morphine for pain – the War on Drugs has caused. Ending these abuses need to be at the center of the deliberations at the UN General Assembly session on drugs.
The biggest United Nations summit on drugs in almost 20 years is over, and while there are signs many countries are stepping back from the destructive “war on drugs” approach to drugs, it’s hard not to conclude that overall the meeting was a missed opportunity.
Three years ago, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico called the meeting, arguing that the cost of the “War on Drugs” had become too high and a new approach was urgently needed. Unfortunately, the document the UN General Assembly approved on Tuesday does not represent a real break with the past but rather business-as-usual, with some shifts in emphasis.
The increased focus on health and human rights in the document is welcome, but as long as the dominantly courts-and-cops approach to fighting drugs continues, the toll from the fight will far outweigh the damage from the drugs themselves. There is little doubt that tens of thousands of people will continue to suffer from drug-related violence and human rights abuses in the coming years; that drug users and those involved in minor trafficking will continue to fill our jails; and that HIV and hepatitis C will continue to wreak havoc among people who inject drugs.
The glass-half-full view is seeing the summit as a key step in the long, complicated process of changing the way the world sees drugs. Importantly, the once-unshakable global consensus on the War on Drugs has been shattered. Much to the chagrin of countries that sought to protect the status quo, led by Russia, a critical mass of reform-minded countries powerfully challenged long-standing orthodoxies on drugs and forced open a debate that had been notoriously insular. Decriminalization of personal use and possession – the key to ending widespread abuses against drug users – is now a mainstream issue. Discussion of the benefits and risks of legalization and regulation of marijuana, unimaginable just a few short years ago, is now firmly part of the debate. While falling far short of what was needed, the summit did unleash winds of change that are gathering force.
So what happens next?
In all likelihood, we will see a further fracturing of the approach to drugs around the world. Some countries will continue down the path of reform – legalizing (medical) cannabis, decriminalizing drug use, and favoring effective health over criminal justice interventions – while others will double down on harsh law enforcement approaches. But ultimately the reformers are likely to have the advantage. Their approach is based in science rather than ideology, and the evidence suggests strongly that they will attain the better public health outcomes.
In 2019, the current global drug strategy will expire. The key question is how many countries will by then be willing to follow the evidence even if it necessitates politically inconvenient steps. The human rights of tens of thousands of people depend on the answer.
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APRIL 21, 2016
7:59 AM EST
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Drug Users Face Abuse in Russia’s Private Treatment Facilities
Tanya Cooper
Tanya Cooper
Researcher, Ukraine and Belarus
tanyacooper_
Experts estimate that three to six million people use illicit drugs in Russia with the number of heroin users topping a million, according to official estimates. Drug users are stigmatized and jailed frequently for possession of very small amounts of drugs. The hardnosed approach by police prompts drug users in Russia to avoid health services for fear of arrest and harassment.
Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia's Federal Drug Control Agency, speaks during a news conference in Moscow October 7, 2009.
EXPAND Viktor Ivanov, head of Russia's Federal Drug Control Agency, speaks during a news conference in Moscow October 7, 2009.
© 2009 Reuters
The Russian government stubbornly refuses to provide drug treatments like opiate substitution that have proven effective. Even funding for treatment that doesn’t involve the use of substitute drugs – an approach the government prefers – is limited. Only a few Russian regions offer state-provided rehabilitation treatment. As a result, treatment is often left in the hands of private companies or organizations.
The government has a duty to regulate these privately-owned facilities to ensure they do not endanger or abuse patients. The Russian government has failed to do this – with predictable consequences. Over the last few years, there have been numerous reports of abuse in these facilities: People are sedated, taken from their homes by force to remote facilities, usually in the countryside, and forced to stay there for months, often without their consent (which family members give for them instead). Some of the “treatment” methods used at such centers are more reminiscent of torture than medical care. According to press reports, drug users at one center were put in a hole in the ground filled with icy water and forced to stay for up to an hour, even in winter. Other methods included physical violence, electroshock, verbal abuse and public humiliation. The media have even reported that people have died in such centers.
To its credit, the government has prosecuted some of the worst cases. But most cases of abuse likely never come to light. The government should take immediate steps to adequately regulate private rehabilitation facilities. If they engage in kidnappings and abuse, they should be shut down. The government should also ensure people with drug dependence have access to a range of treatments - including drug substitution – that are based on evidence. Only then, will Russia be able to start to address the problem of drug dependence.
IN MEXICO
MEXICO CITY — Two days after Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadán was kidnapped by a criminal gang, the Mexican Army raided the remote ranch where he was a prisoner and killed him. As he instinctively raised his hands in defense, the soldiers fired over and over at point-blank range.
A brief army communiqué about the event asserted that soldiers had returned fire and killed three hit men at the El Puerto ranch on April 26, 2010.
But Mr. Parral had fired no weapon.
He was a government employee, the supervisor of a bridge crossing into Texas, when he and a customs agent were abducted, according to a 2013 investigation by the National Human Rights Commission. The case, which is still open, has volleyed among prosecutors, yet his parents persist, determined that someone be held accountable.
“Tell me if this looks like the face of a killer to you,” said Alicia Rabadán Sánchez, Mr. Parral’s mother, pulling a photograph of a happy young man from a plastic folder.
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In the years since the Mexican government began an intense military campaign against drug gangs, many stories like Mr. Parral’s have surfaced — accounts of people caught at the intersection of organized crime, security forces and a failing justice system.
They are killed at military checkpoints, vanish inside navy facilities or are tortured by federal police officers. Seldom are their cases investigated. A trial and conviction are even more rare.
But are these cases just regrettable accidents in the course of a decade-long government battle against drug violence? A new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, which works on criminal justice reforms around the world, argues that they are not. Instead, the study says, they point to a pattern of indiscriminate force and impunity that is an integral part of the state’s policy.
And in the framework of international law, the study argues, the killings, forced disappearances and torture constitute crimes against humanity.
The evidence is “overwhelming,” said James A. Goldston, the executive director of the New York-based Justice Initiative, which will release the report on Tuesday. “In case after case, army actors and federal police have been implicated.”
But in all but a few cases, the allegations languish, are dismissed or are reclassified. “The impunity is a loud signal that crimes against humanity are being committed,” Mr. Goldston said.
The Justice Initiative report is the first time an international group has made a public legal argument that the pattern of abuses amounts to crimes against humanity. The finding is significant, Mr. Goldston said, because under the lens of international law, an investigation would seek to determine the chain of command behind the policy.
The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto rejected the conclusions.
“Based on international law, crimes against humanity are generalized or systematic attacks against a civilian population which are committed in accordance with a state policy,” the government said in a statement. “In Mexico the immense majority of violent crimes have been committed by criminal organizations.”
The report does not dispute that last point. Its analysis, which covers the six-year administration of former President Felipe Calderón and the first three years of Mr. Peña Nieto’s government, also looks at the Zetas, the most violent of Mexico’s drug gangs. Their brutal actions constitute crimes against humanity as well, the report concludes.
The government said that in the “exceptional cases” in which public officials have been shown to be involved in the use of excessive force, human rights abuses or torture, they have been tried and sentenced.
But human rights and international organizations have argued for years that these cases are not exceptional.
Rather than ask the International Criminal Court to begin an investigation, the Justice Initiative proposes that the crimes be investigated at home.
Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadán in 1997. Credit Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
“One of the things that we have learned is that Mexico is rich in financial resources and human capital in these issues,” Mr. Goldston said. The Justice Initiative has been working in Mexico for more than a decade.
But the investigations “simply haven’t happened because in our view the political will is not there,” Mr. Goldston said.
The report “explains how we have reached this state of impunity,” said José Antonio Guevara, the director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. The government’s “understanding at the highest level is that what they’re doing is the right thing to weaken organized crime,” he said.
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