Prime Minister of Mauritius pledges to bring back the death penalty for drug offences

Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam last night repeated his intention to reintroduce the death penalty for those found guilty of very serious criminal offences such as murder and drug trafficking, including the drug Subutex.

He also announced that the use of Subutex could be banned in Mauritius. The prime minister made the remarks at the launch of the National Policing Stategic Framework at the Paul Octave Wiehe Auditorium, University of Mauritius.

“We intend to amend the law to impose the death penalty for murder and drug trafficking,” said a determined Dr Ramgoolam, adding that the Dangerous Drugs Act was amended by his government to include Subutex on the list of dangerous drugs.

“Subutex is available on prescription in countries like France. Some are trying to do trafficking of Subutex here. If you cannot live without Subutex, do not come to Mauritius. Go somewhere else.”

http://www.kotzot.com/news/navin-ramgoolam-mauritius.html

Other sources quote the Prime Minnister as saying further: “We have to be severe. Subutex will not be allowed in the country. Even those who have to take Subutex under medical prescription will not be spared. It is better that they do not come to Mauritius on holidays with Subutex; they will have to face severe penalties”

http://www.defimedia.info/articles/6935/1/PM-promises-death-penalty-law-before-election/Page1.html

Just over a year ago Ramgoolam’s government co-sponsored and voted in favour of the UN Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty.

Subutex is a brand name for the drug buprenorphine. It is commonly used to treat opiate addiction and is included on the WHO model essential medicines list.

Why the war on drugs in Colombia may never be won, Guardian (UK), 16 February 2010

Decades after Richard Nixon tried to end the trafficking of cocaine from Colombia, success seems as elusive as ever

Rory Carroll, Latin America Correspondent

Article available on Guardian website

Up close, erythroxylum coca looks almost pretty – a plant with curving branches, green leaves and small yellow flowers that mature into red berries.

It has been cultivated on the slopes of the Andes since before the Incas, and invested with divine properties. When chewed, its leaves act as a mild stimulant and help overcome hunger, thirst and fatigue.

But these virtues do not alter the fact that having an ideal climate and terrain for coca – the raw ingredient of cocaine – has been a catastrophe for Colombia. The crop has wrought violence, narco-trafficking and corruption.

Divine or otherwise, coca has proved resilient, verging on indestructible, in withstanding the decades-old “war on drugs” declared by Richard Nixon and prosecuted by successive US presidents.

Military helicopters continue to scythe over treetops in the Colombian jungle and hundreds of millions of dollars are still poured into the fight – but there is a growing conviction that it cannot be won.

It may evolve and change shape, move from jungles to cities and from bloody battles to discreet bribes, but it will not end with a flag planted in the ground and victory declared.

An individual coca bush is fragile, but the forces behind it are powerful and adaptable: peasant farmers who turn the leaves into paste, clandestine laboratories which turn it into powder, guerrillas and armed gangs who traffic it abroad, middle men and state authorities who launder the revenue. Each link in the chain has a strong incentive.

A peasant in certain remote parts of Colombia has a choice: grow corn, rice, potatoes and vegetables for prices that fluctuate and sometimes barely make it worthwhile, or grow coca, safe in the knowledge of a handsome return.

Colombia’s US-backed eradication effort includes satellites and fumigation-spraying aircraft, but growers have adapted with more resistant strains and smaller plots hidden under taller plants.

Government inducements to wean peasants off coca with loans and alternative economic activities have faltered.

“Government policies related to zero coca, and strict verification procedures, take a long time and limit the state’s ability to work with communities in transitioning from a coca economy to a legal economy,” a recent US Agency for International Development (USAID) report said.

“When security and coca eradication are not synchronised with the arrival of socio-economic projects, the mood of a community can quickly become hostile.”

A new book, Shooting Up: Counter-insurgency and the War on Drugs, by the respected Brookings Institution scholar Vanda Felbab-Brown, says eradication campaigns in Afghanistan and Colombia have left drug production unaffected but alienated locals, gifting political capital to insurgents.

Plan Colombia, the military-heavy US aid programme, has had significant success in helping the country’s security forces push Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) guerrillas out of cities and deep into the jungle.

A country that once risked collapsing into chaos now has political stability, a growing economy and a popular president, Alvaro Uribe. But Farc and a smaller leftist rebel group, the ELN, have adapted to their restricted theatre of operations and continued trafficking cocaine, which remains their main income source.

In recent months, Farc has made a military comeback, ambushing troops and kidnapping and killing a provincial governor. Analysts think the pendulum could be swinging back their way.

“The Farc seem to be bouncing back,” Leon Valencia, the director of the Nuevo Arco Iris (New Rainbow) thinktank, said. “The decline of the democratic security policy has begun.”

Rightwing paramilitary groups also remain in the game. Originally set up by ranchers in the 1980s to combat leftist guerrillas, the paramilitaries mutated into narco-trafficking private armies.

They controlled swaths of territory and co-opted businesses and politicians until a government scheme from 2005 demobilised 32,000. Many leaders were extradited to the US, but many lower-ranking “paras” who failed to find jobs or promised state assistance have returned to what they know best – trafficking drugs.

“According to the government, the [demobilisation] process was successful. However, shortly after the demobilisation process, new successor groups emerged in the entire country that continued the criminal activities,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch, said.

A recently-published report by the organisation – Paramilitaries’ Heirs: The New Face of Violence in Colombia – makes grim reading.

The city of Medellin, once the showcase of Colombia’s counter-narcotics fight, illustrates the intractability of the problem. A steep fall in violence paved the way for an apparent urban renaissance, but murder rates rose again last year as drug gangs battled for control.

Prominent local figures, with government backing, are now trying to negotiate a truce. That has raised suspicion of a return to the era of discreet pacts, when officials gave cartels free rein to traffick cocaine in return for social peace.

With victory in the so-called drug war ever more elusive, there are growing calls around the world – from thinktanks, law enforcement officials and former presidents – to decriminalise cocaine.

Just as the end of prohibition doomed the bootleggers, the logic goes, decriminalisation could put traffickers out of business. It is an experiment no government has yet dared to try.

Security, development and human rights: Normative, legal and policy challenges for the international drug control system, Damon Barrett, International Journal of Drug Policy 2010

International Journal of Drug Policy 21 (2010) 140-144

Abstract

This commentary addresses some of the challenges posed by the broader normative, legal and policy framework of the United Nations for the international drug control system. In doing so it draws on existing work and also presents, it is hoped, some new perspectives. The ‘purposes and principles’ of the United Nations are briefly explained and set against the threat based rhetoric of the drug control system and the negative consequences of that regime. Some of the challenges posed by human rights law and norms to the international drug control system are also described, and the need for an impact assessment of the current system alongside alternative policy options is highlighted as a necessary consequence of these analyses.

The full article is available here

Romanian article wrongly cites International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, correction sought

An article has appeared in the Romanian press quoting the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy as criticising the Romanian government for its policies regarding head-shops and legal highs.

A ‘press release’ from the Centre is cited.

We have issued NO such press release nor made any comments regarding the Romanian government’s policies. We are an academic project and not engaged in advocacy at this level.

We are currently seeking a correction to the story and attempting to track down the source of the press release.

Update, 16 February:

This article has been removed from one news source and we are seeking its removal from another two

The Widening Web of Control: A Human Rights Analysis of Public Policy Responses to Crime, Social Problems and Deviance (Draft Report, February 2010, ICHRP)

The International Council on Human Rights Policy project on ‘social control and human rights’  focuses on five policy areas with strong control dimensions, which raise human rights concerns. The five policy-contexts examined by the project are: a) Policing and surveillance; b) Punishment and incarceration; c) Migrants and non-citizens; d) Urban spaces and the poor; and e) Infectious disease control. In addition, a case study of control measures applied to the Roma in Europe was also undertaken.

While these areas are not drug specific, most are of course of clear relevance. The draft report “The Widening Web of Control” is available online is and well worth a read for some of the rights based thinking applied to these areas.

Human Rights Watch calls on UN to review its role in Cambodian drug detention centres

January 31 2010

(New York) – The United Nations should conduct a thorough review of its support for Cambodia’s drug detention centers, Human Rights Watch said today.

Human Rights Watch issued a 93-page report, “Skin on the Cable“, on January 25, 2010, with reports of widespread beatings, whippings, and electric shock to detainees, including children and individuals with mental disabilities, in seven Cambodian drug detention centers. In response, several United Nations agencies, including the joint UN program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), have spoken out about the abuses. But the two UN agencies that work most closely with the government in detention centers and on drug policy, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), have been less vocal.

“UN officials agree that these centers are illegal and abusive,” said Joe Amon, health and human rights director at Human Rights Watch. “Now UNICEF and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime need to make clear to the Cambodian government that the centers should be shut down.”

The Cambodian government is in the process of finalizing a new law on drug control, with technical support from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. But the draft law, a copy of which was obtained by Human Rights Watch, does not provide adequate protection against abuse for children and adults forcibly detained under the guise of providing them with treatment for drug dependency.

In particular, the draft law purports to offer immunity from prosecution to “officers who implement drug treatment and rehabilitation measures in accordance with the right to drug treatment.” International law does not permit immunity for officials who commit serious abuses – including ill-treatment and torture – in the course of their duties.

“The UN agency responsible for drug control should forcefully oppose any laws that do not meet international standards,” Amon said. “The draft law on drug control would protect abusers and violate Cambodia’s human rights obligations.”

According to its web site, the UNODC office in Cambodia has supported the government since 2001 in developing “effective approaches and techniques to deal with drug abuse” and “coordinated, community-based drug abuse counseling, treatment and rehabilitation care programs.” Part of that support has involved technical assistance, with more than US$1 million earmarked for the development of community-based treatment.

The Human Rights Watch report revealed that, among other abuses in the detention centers, detainees are often forced to work at hard manual labor or exercise as a means of “treatment.” Human Rights Watch said that comments to the press by Interior Ministry spokesperson, Khieu Sopheak, that labor and “sweating” were “one of the main ways to make drug-addicted people to become normal people,” demonstrated that the Cambodian government is not committed to international standards. The remarks also show that the UN Office on Drug and Crime’s engagement with the government has not yet built sufficient understanding and capacity to provide effective treatment, Human Rights Watch said.

Since the release of the Human Rights Watch report last week, UNICEF has faced intense public scrutiny for involvement in the Choam Chao “youth rehabilitation centre.” A representative of the European Union has called for an investigation to determine if EU funding for UNICEF has supported human rights violations in the centers.  UNICEF officials have said that they have supported government monitoring of the facilities and have not been aware of any abuses. The project is in the final year of funding, and plans for continued engagement are under review.

“We met with UNICEF in Cambodia last September about these abuses, and they told us they would investigate,” Amon said. “But they haven’t, and they continue to claim that children are in these centers voluntarily.”

UNICEF also refused to share with Human Rights Watch their reports of past assessments conducted in collaboration with the Cambodian government.

Cambodian government officials have refused to meet with Human Rights Watch since the report was released and did not respond to written requests for information as the report was being prepared. Government and detention center officials have been quoted in local and international press reports denying the most severe abuses, though acknowledging physically punishing and drugging detainees.

In an interview with Radio Australia, Nean Sokhim, director of a center in Phnom Penh, said that detainees are given drugs to keep them from escaping. The commander of the military police detention center  in the province of Banteay Meanchay described to the press how detainees at his center were forced to stand in the sun or “walk like monkeys” as punishment for attempting to escape.

“The Cambodian government needs to investigate these centers and hold those responsible for these abuses accountable,” Amon said. “Instead of remaining silent, the United Nations should review its programs and support for these centers, and work with the government to shut them down.”