In Pictures: State of emergency in Jamaica

The Guardian, UK, has a series of photographs documenting the continuing violence in Jamaica as police and military clash with supporters of alleged drug trafficker Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/may/25/jamaica-unrest-continues?picture=363021850

See also

‘Kingston declares state of emergency after gangs attack police‘, Guardian

‘Jamaica: Forces attack gang leader’s stronghold‘, New York Times/AP

UPDATE: Jamaican army accused or murdering civilians, Guardian

Yong Vui Kong and Public Prosecutor – Singapore Court of Appeal

In this case, the plaintiff, Yong Vui Kong, challenged the constitutionality of Singapore’s mandatory death penalty for drug offences.  The Court of Appeal ruled against the plaintiff, finding the mandatory death penalty constitutional.

The full judgement of the Court of Appeal is available below.

Yong Vui Kong judgment – Singapore 2010

‘Canadian Court of Appeal upholds supervised injection site’s right to operate’ by Sandra Ka Hon Chu, International Yearbook on Human Rights and Drug Policy

From International Yearbook on Human Rights and Drug Policy (Vol 1, 2010)

Case Summary : PHS Community Services Society v. Canada (Attorney General), 2010 BCCA 15 (B.C. Court of Appeal)

On 15 January 2010, the British Columbia Court of Appeal, the province’s highest appellate court, held that Insite, North America’s first supervised injection facilty, was a provincial undertaking that did not undermine the federal goals of protecting health or eliminating the market that drives drugrelated offences. As such, the Court held that the drug possession and trafficking provisions of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA) did not apply to Insite.

IYHRDP 2010 Chu

European Court of Justice Weighs Dutch Cannabis Ban for Foreigners, Der Spiegel, 5th May 2010

By Paul van der Steen in Luxembourg

The Dutch government wants to ban cannabis sales to foreigners, but coffee shops in Holland argue that it’s a violation of EU free-trade regulations. The European Court of Justice will now decide.

The continuing struggle of Dutch border towns against drug tourism could soon take a new turn, as the European Court of Justice (ECJ) prepares to hand down a ruling regarding one of the most severe measures employed in this battle so far.

Last Thursday, the ECJ heard arguments in Josemans v. Maastricht. The case dates to 2006, when authorities found two foreign nationals on the premises of Easy Going, a coffee shop that sells cannabis. Maastricht is the largest city in the far south of the Netherlands; it sits directly on the Belgian border and is only a 30 minute drive from Germany. The Easy Going coffee shop there is owned by Marc Josemans, who is also the chairman of a branch association to which the city’s coffee shop owners belong.

Free Market for Drugs?

Law enforcement officers found the two foreigners shortly after a municipal regulation had gone into effect prohibiting the presence of foreigners in coffee shops. It remains the only time the city has enforced the new law as the municipality awaits the outcome of the ECJ case. In the Netherlands, the case has made its way up to the Council of State, the highest Dutch court ruling on such matters. Before the European Court gives a ruling, the council has asked it whether distinguishing between local and foreign cannabis customers isn’t at odds with the underlying principles of the European Union’s internal market.

In a weird legal twist, the case has led to a clash between the EU’s laws governing free trade among member states and Holland’s soft-drug policy. For decades, the Netherlands has had a unique policy governing soft drugs, effectively decriminalizing — though not legalizing — the use of cannabis. The sale of soft drugs through coffee shops is strictly regulated: Advertising is not allowed, for example; nor is selling to underage customers.

On the other hand, the European Union guarantees a free, unified market of goods and services among its members. Whether this should apply to the semi-legal parts of the Netherlands’ cannabis industry is the question now up for debate.

André Beckers, Joseman’s legal counsel, has argued it should. He claims cannabis is an economic commodity like any other. Beckers has shown that Easy Going, one of Maastricht’s 14 coffee shops, expects to sell €10 million worth of cannabis this year, in addition to the €500,000 it stands to make from “normal” activities, such as selling coffee. Because of the illegal nature of some of its business, a coffee shop is under no obligation to pay sales tax on the cannabis it sells, but Easy Going is required to pay income tax, employee benefits, corporate tax and value-added tax on its legal revenues. The lawyer also cited a recent study which found coffee shops indirectly added €140 million and 1,370 jobs to the Dutch economy.

Maintaining Public Order

Sander Lely, an attorney for the city, countered that trade in contraband could never be covered by regulations governing the common market. “That some of its revenue is generated through the sale of legal products is irrelevant,” Lely said. He was supported in his argument by both Dutch and Belgian representatives.

Hubert van Vliet, a representative of the European Commission, pointed out the possible consequences if the ECJ found coffee shops were not covered by EU laws. “Everything pertaining to coffee shops would then be exempt,” he argued. “What will that mean for the border workers employed there? The free flow of capital would also be affected, which means only Dutch nationals would be allowed to own coffee shops.”

Lely and the representative of the Dutch state argued that the exclusion of foreign nationals from coffee shops was not merely a matter of Dutch self interest, but also important for the maintenance of public order in other EU member states. “The Netherlands is subject to international pressure in this respect,” said Corina Wissels, the Dutch representative. Approximately 70 percent of the 2 million people who visit a Maastricht coffee shop each year are from foreign countries, mainly Germany, France and Belgium. The Belgian representative asked the court to consider the nuisance caused by French drug users traveling through Belgium, drug runners and users returning home driving under the influence.

Customer-Card System

Arguing for the European Commission, Van der Vliet referred to an earlier ruling by the ECJ concerning Polish prostitutes in the Netherlands. In that case, the court ruled that a member states could not apply one set of business laws to its own citizens and another set to other EU nationals. “The European Commission does not oppose a test case in itself,” he said. “But why haven’t less far-reaching measures been tried first, such as a customer-card system, reducing the maximum amount available to single customers or requiring customers to consume purchased wares on the spot?”

The judges expressed surprise over the Dutch drug policy. They asked what the coffee shop’s permit was for exactly, if the sale of cannabis was technically illegal in the Netherlands. The court also wondered who supplied the drugs on sale to the coffee shop. The state perhaps?

The ECJ declined to schedule a specific date for its ruling. It did, however, promise to process the case quickly. A definitive ruling by the Dutch Council of State is expected before the end of this year. The case will play an important part in the formation of new Dutch soft-drug policy. Mayors of Dutch border municipalities have also said they would await a ruling by the Council of State before experimenting with customer cards for cannabis users.

***

Reference for a preliminary ruling from the Raad van State (Netherlands) lodged on 15 April 2009 — M.M. Josemans and the Burgemeester of Maastricht v Rechtbank Maastricht

(Case C-137/09)

(2009/C 141/57)

Language of the case: Dutch

Referring court

Raad van State

Parties to the main proceedings

Applicants:

1. M.M. Josemans

2. Burgemeester of Maastricht

Questions referred

1. Does a regulation, such as that at issue in the main proceedings, concerning the access of non-residents to coffeeshops, fall wholly or partly within the scope of the EC Treaty, with particular reference to the free movement of goods and/or services, or of the prohibition of discrimination laid down in Article 12 in conjunction with Article 18 of the EC Treaty?
2. In so far as the provisions of the EC Treaty concerning the free movement of goods and/or services are applicable, does a prohibition of the admission of non-residents to coffeeshops form a suitable and proportionate means of reducing drug tourism and the public nuisance which accompanies it?
3. Is the prohibition of discrimination against citizens on grounds of nationality, as laid down in Article 12 in conjunction with Article 18 of the EC Treaty, applicable to the rules on the access of non-residents to coffeeshops if and in so far as the provisions of the EC Treaty concerning the free movement of goods and services are not applicable?
4. If so, is the resulting indirect distinction between residents and non-residents justified, and is the prohibition of the admission of non-residents to coffeeshops a suitable and proportionate means of reducing drug tourism and the public nuisance which accompanies it?

Detention of Methamphetamine Users in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, Open Society Institute, May 2010

The widespread availability and use of methamphetamine in Southeast Asia has been a very real concern for families and communities. Central to the response in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia has been compulsory detention—generally without medical management of detoxification.

Detention in these centers is itself a threat to health and life: detainees are often subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and risk of contracting infectious diseases is high. Virtually 100 percent of people return to drug use upon leaving detention. Yet these centers continue to receive support from governments under the banner of “treatment” for drug use.

This report published by the Open Society Institute and the Nossal Institute for Global Health calls on the United Nations and donor countries such as the United States to immediately cease any financial support for maintaining or building new detention centers. It further calls on the governments of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand to release those currently detained, and devise strategies to permanently close drug detention centres.

The full report is available via the Open Society Institute

UN Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights quizzes Mauritius on drug policy, HIV/AIDS and the death penalty

10 May 2010, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has considered the combined second to fourth periodic report of Mauritius (E./C.12/MUS/4) on how that country implements the provisions of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Among the questions and issues raised by Committee Experts were the growing problems of intravenous drug use among the population which had led to an increase in violent crime and a surge in the number of HIV infections. The Committee also raised concerns about discussions in Mauritius to reinstitute the death penalty, which had been abolished in the country, in order to deal with the rise in violent crime.

Other questions related to measures to address injection driven HIV/AIDS (the primary driver of the epidemic in the country), discrimination against female drug users, and the impact of drug trafficking on employment.

The summary of the meeting is available at the website of the OHCHR

At an earlier session the Committee had also asked questions of the Algerian delegation relating to its drug policies, asking whether the policy was one of “criminalization or treatment”

Children in the Line of Fire in Ciudad Juárez, IPS News, 10 May 2010

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico, May 10, 2010 (IPS) – In Ciudad Juárez, the most violent city in Latin America, Mexico’s war on drugs has left at least 110 children dead in the past three years, and over 10,000 have lost parents.

Civil society organisations are urging the authorities elected in an upcoming ballot to meet the needs of this vulnerable population.

An air of despair hangs over this border city. Deserted streets and empty houses — about 100,000 of them — testify to the defeat of a society that has gone through horror, indignation, rage and exhaustion in the past two decades.

When night falls there is a kind of voluntary curfew, in contrast to the lively night life that used to animate the city centre. Few people walk the streets, even in daylight, and most people think twice before answering phone calls from numbers they do not recognise. One-third of the shops are closed in this northern Mexican city across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Verito is seven years old. In December, her school teachers were forced to hand over their extra month’s salary, paid before Christmas, in “protection money” to an organised crime group so that the pupils would not be harmed.

“They say they threatened the head teacher with putting bombs in the school, and that’s why they cancelled classes,” she says.

She knows that there are people in her city who kidnap and kill children. And that “all” adults “pay their dues” to drug mafias: “They have to pay money,” she explains, before talking about her dream of a city “that is the same, but without violence, without the news.” Her account is part of “Un, dos, tres, por mí y por todos mis amigos” (One, two three, for me and all my friends), a project that includes a book and a DVD recording voices, drawings and photographs of Ciudad Juárez four-to-eight-year-olds, compiled between 2008 and 2010 by civil society organisations belonging to the “Infancia en Movimiento” (Childhood in Movement) initiative.

The strategy against drug trafficking adopted by the Mexican government has in the last three years led to the deaths of at least 110 children who were caught in the crossfire between federal police, the armed forces and drug cartels in this city in the state of Chihuahua.

Non-governmental organisations estimate that about 10,000 children have lost at least one parent in the war on drugs, on the basis that each of the 5,000 murder victims of reproductive age probably had two children, in line with demographic statistics. But there are no official figures.

“It’s tragic that there isn’t even an official estimate of the number of children who have lost a parent to the violence,” Lourdes Almada, the technical secretary of the Children’s Board of the Citizens’ Council for Social Development, told IPS.

“Children who have suffered violence in their families or close circles are not receiving assistance from anyone,” she added.

Since 1993, when the ongoing wave of murders of factory women began in Ciudad Juárez, the city has earned a world reputation for gender violence, which has claimed over 1,000 women’s lives so far, and for the entrenchment of criminal organisations.

“Ciudad Juárez is different from other places in the country because the drug traffickers here have overstepped all the boundaries. It’s very difficult to react to the violence against children,” Juárez filmmaker Ángel Estrada, who directed the documentary film “Escenarios de guerra” (Scenes of War), told IPS.

The film, which premièred here Apr. 28, is about the impossibility of doing theatre in such a violent city.

In 2005, Ciudad Juárez was in an uproar over the deaths of two girls: seven-year-old Airis Estrella Enríquez, whose body was found in a barrel filled with cement, and 10-year-old Anahí Orozco, whom a neighbour raped and killed before setting fire to her body, while her mother was working in a “maquiladora”, a factory that assembles goods for export.

That same year, six other children were murdered, but still no funds were made available for protecting children.

Now local newspapers are reporting news like the murder of a family while they were at a wake for a teenager killed in Parral, a city in southern Chihuahua.

The murders of 16 young people at a party in the neighbourhood of Villas de Salvárcar in February brought a flurry of federal officials to the city where they spent many hours in meetings, but with no results.

“Underneath all this there are decades of neglect and of a lack of efforts towards human and social development,” said Almada. “The explosion of violence in Juárez is the result of an economic model that does not take people into account.”

Another form of violence in Ciudad Juárez is reflected by the fact that in the course of 2008 and 2009, 300,000 direct, indirect and temporary jobs were lost, among a population of just over 1.2 million.

Lay-offs have been heavy at the maquiladoras, a mainstay in Ciudad Juárez, which employ mostly women. These factories, which enjoy tax breaks and other benefits, have shed 120,000 jobs, for each of which an estimated 1.5 jobs are lost in the informal economy.

“What is happening in Ciudad Juárez is an expression of social exclusion,” Nashieli Ramírez, head of Ririki Intervención Social, a social organisation, and coordinator of Infancia en Movimiento, told IPS. “It is going to happen all over the world, not just in Mexico, with this rush to urbanisation that cannot be understood except from the marginalisation and social exclusion that we will all experience.”

And so we go on, “without any options for young people, with children who can’t play in the streets, isolated families and single mothers,” she added.

It is an enormous challenge. Ciudad Juárez has one of the highest proportions of children in this country of over 107 million people, and yet it has the lowest indicators of care and protection.

The infant mortality rate is over 25 per 1,000 live births, while the index for countries like Costa Rica or Cuba is below 10 per 1,000.

The city holds the national record for women’s participation in the workforce, and one-quarter of working mothers leave their children alone for three or four hours a day.

Children in Ciudad Juárez candidly say they have seen three, four or five people killed on the streets. Seven-year-old Alicia says she feels unsafe in public places, and eight-year-old Irving Leonardo draws a picture of himself “in a drug traffickers’ hotel with gold taps.”

Faced with this situation, organisations devoted to children’s welfare are launching a campaign, Hazlo Por Juárez (Do It for Juárez), financed by the Bernard van Leer Foundation, aimed at influencing the political platforms of candidates running for the Juárez mayor’s office and the Chihuahua state government in the upcoming Jul. 4 elections.

“We are going to launch a social movement in Juárez, and we want it to have an impact across the country,” Ramírez said.

“We cannot lose another generation. We have to open the door to a different future,” said Almada.

See also:

Effect of Drug Law Enforcement on Drug-Related Violence: Evidence from a Scientific Review, International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, April 2010

Effect of Drug Law Enforcement on Drug-Related Violence: Evidence from a Scientific Review, International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, April 2010

Executive Summary

Violence is among the primary concerns of communities around the world, and research from many settings has demonstrated clear links between violence and the illicit drug trade, particularly in urban settings. While violence has traditionally been framed as resulting from the effects of drugs on individual users (e.g., drug-induced psychosis), violence in drug markets and in drug-producing areas such as Mexico is increasingly understood as a means for drug gangs to gain or maintain a share of the lucrative illicit drug market.

Given the growing emphasis on evidence-based policy-making and the ongoing severe violence attributable to drug gangs in many countries around the world, a systematic review of the available English language scientific literature was conducted to examine the impacts of drug law enforcement interventions on drug market violence.

The full report is available in English and Spanish, and soon in Russian

‘Drugs and human rights: private palliatives, sacramental freedoms and cognitive liberty’ C. Walsh, International Journal of Human Rights, 2010

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the impact of ten years of domestic incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) on the evolution of the United Kingdom’s primary piece of prohibitive drugs legislation, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The significant cases where traditional interpretation of this Act has been challenged in the courts using the Convention are discussed. Structured thematically, this paper looks at the interplay between drug prohibition and human rights in addressing complex issues, such as our right to self-medicate, to practice our religion(s) freely, and to explore our own consciousness. The intention is to expose the untapped potential of the ECHR as a tool with which to fundamentally challenge the (discriminatory) drug policy of the United Kingdom.

International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 14, No. 3, May 2010, 425–441