Khadeija Mahgoub, Article 33 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: The Journey from Drafting History to the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child, Human Rights and Drugs, Vol.2, No.I, 2012

ABSTRACT

Article 33 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is an important international legal instrument that obligates States Parties to protect children and youth from involvement with illicit drugs and the drug trade. This article provides an analysis of the drafting history of article 33 to the evolving interpretations of its terms in the Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child. It reveals a clear connection to the right to health as well as a dynamic interpretation of the article by the Committee. To improve the Committee’s Concluding Observations moving forward, a General Comment on the article is recommended.

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New book on Convention of the Rights of the Child and Narcotic Drugs

A Commentary on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 33: Protection from Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances

By Damon Barrett and Philip E. Veerman

This volume constitutes a commentary on Article 33 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is part of the series, A Commentary on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which provides an article by article analysis of all substantive, organizational and procedural provisions of the CRC and its two Optional Protocols. For every article, a comparison with related human rights provisions is made, followed by an in-depth exploration of the nature and scope of State obligations deriving from that article. The series constitutes an essential tool for actors in the field of children’s rights, including academics, students, judges, grassroots workers, governmental, non- governmental and international officers. The series is sponsored by the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office.

Biographical note

Damon Barrett is Senior Human Rights Analyst with London-based Harm Reduction International and cofounder of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy. He is an editor-in-chief of the International Journal on Human Rights and Drug Policy, and editor of Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People (IDEA, iDebate Press, New York and Amsterdam, 2011).

Philip E. Veerman is a psychologist at Bouman mental health services in Rotterdam, where he is responsible for the professional training programme for health psychologists. He is an independent expert of the courts in the Netherlands.

To find out more, go to the website of Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Afghan Children Ensnared in Heroin Trade With Iran

The Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) published this week an exclusive investigation on the use of Afghan children as drug mules, who take high risks to smuggle heroin into Iran.

The story highlights the risks not only from swalling pellets with heroin, which can burst during the way, but also how children are vulnerable to smugglers who use them to bypass the draconian drug trafficking penalties in Iran.

“Some children are killed, while others have been thrown in prison. In fact, children are attractive to the smugglers because they are not executed in Iran, where drug trafficking is a serious offence that carries capital punishment.”

Most children earn very little in comparison to the high profits made by smugglers. They often don’t know the risks involved or as the report explains, some parents will rent their kids for smuggling.

This highlights the complex situation in Afghanistan, where families depend on the opium trade due to the lack of viable alternative development funding. As one of the children interviewed said “the smugglers exploit our poverty and obligations.” The International Labor Office (ILO) and UNICEF define the use of children for drug smuggling as child trafficking and one of the worst forms of child labour.

The tough choices made by families is also evident in the case of farming families who are coerced into giving away their children to repay a debt to local drug lords. For more on this issue read ‘In the Shadows of the Insurgency in Afghanistan: Child Bartering, Opium Debt, and the War on Drugs’ by Atal Ahmadzai and Christopher Kuonqui, published in Children of the Drug War.

Additional information on child drug mules:

‘The use of children in the production, sales and trafficking of drugs: a synthesis of participatory action-oriented research programs in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand’, by Emma Porio and Christine S. Crisol, published by the International Labor Office (2004). Click here for the report.

Stop the Traffik: End Child Exploitation, UNICEF UK (2003). Read this report on the changing face of human trafficking and children smuggling drugs into the United Kingdom.

Poverty Provides Growing Number of ‘Drug Mules’, by Angel Paez, published by Inter Press Service(2008). Read the story.

Children in Mexico: Criminals or Victims?

Children in Mexico’s ‘Drug War’: Criminals or Victims?

Mexico’s drug war has taken its toll on children. More than 30,000 of them have been involved in organized crime, according to the Children’s Rights Network (REDIM).

These children are paid by drug gangs to do minor roles such as drug running or being lookouts, but some have been trained to kill. This was the case of 14-year-old Edgar Jimenez, nicknamed ‘El Ponhis’ or ‘The Cloak’, arrested last year. Jimenez had been kidnapped at the age of 11 and forced into crime.

The circumstances that have lead to children’s involvement in organized crime vary, according to the story published by CNN. Social exclusion and economic marginality play a strong role. But also coercion by threats of violence against them or their families.

In this sense, the Children’s Rights Network has urged the government to recognize them as victims of child abuse. In a country where 30,000-50,000 people have died in the ‘drug war’, children have been orphaned and neglected.

There is a need to “take into account the long-term psychological damage to children associated with high levels of violence and the resultant breakdown in family, community, and social structures”, according to Aram Barra and Daniel Joloy’s article in Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People. If the government does not take responsibility for upholding their rights, the long term consequences will not only be felt by these children and their families, but on whole communities.

As Barra and Joloy conclude, “drugs should be addressed as a public health and development issue, rather than a security issue, and only if children are truly placed at the forefront of more effective drug policies rather than being left to drift in a sea of violence.”

Opium brides

PBS Frontline broadcasted on January 3 a thought provoking reportage on Afghanistan’s opium brides. Reporter Najibullah Quraishi journeyed into the Afghan countryside to reveal the deadly bargain local farm families have been forced to make with drug smugglers in order to survive.

Watch this story and related stories in Frontline’s website.

For more information on the opium brides, read also “In the Shadows of the Insurgency in Afghanistan: Child Bartering, Opium Debt, and the War on Drugs by Atal Ahmadzai and Christopher Kuonqui, published in Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People.

‘Harm Reduction and Human Rights’, D. Barrett and P. Gallahue, Interights Bulletin, Winter 2011.

Human Rights and Abuses to Health Care, Interights Bulletin, Winter 2011, Volume 16, Number 4.

Harm Reduction and Human Rights

Abstract

‘Harm reduction’ is a phrase that may be unfamiliar to many in the human rights field despite the fact that its ethos and way of working is very close to it. Based on pragmatism, evidence, and compassion, harm reduction has been often misunderstood, side-lined, and isolated from human rights discourse. This paper shows how harm reduction has made important strides in human rights bodies of the United Nations. However, its application is critically absent anti-narcotics policy despite evidence of grave human rights violations done in the name of the “war on drugs” . The paper concludes that jurisprudence and scholarship around the human rights dimensions of harm reduction will be critical in understanding what works in protecting people from drug-related harms, but what is appropriate and necessary in a democratic society to achieve this legitimate aim

Download the full version of the publication.

A new language for the children of the drug wars

For decades, governments have used the rhetoric of war to describe their drug control efforts and rally their populations behind hardline policies they say will help protect children. Nayeli Urquiza, Research Fellow at the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, argues it’s this very terminology that encourages the abuse of children by turning them into enemies of the state.

This guest editorial was originally published in the November issue of Matters of Substance, a publication of the New Zealand Drug Foundation.

For more information on this issue, read the book “Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies on Young People”. Available online or download the PDF at www.childrenofthedrugwar.org

Children of the Drug War: Webcast of the seminar held at LSE’s Mannheim Centre for Criminology

The Mannheim Centre for Criminology (LSE) held on November 22 a specialty seminar to mark the publication of “Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the Impact of Drug Policies in Young People”.

The panel, chaired by Damon Barrett, editor of ‘Children of the Drug War’ included three of the contributors of ‘Children of the Drug War’. Jennifer Fleetwood, lecturer at the University of Kent, who talked about the impact of the ‘war on drugs’ on women and children in Ecuador’s prisons.

Michael Shiner, lecturer at the London School of Economics, talked about the limits of harm reduction in England and Wales and addressing drug use among young people. Steve Rolles, from Transform and author of ‘After of War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’, presented ideas about how to better protect children and young people through State regulation instead of prohibition. He argued that the prohibition paradigm instead of reducing the harms from drugs, has actually increased it, either by the availability of impure or contaminated drugs in the market or through the violence associated with actors trying to control the illlict drug market.

Damon Barrett concluded the discussion by saying that drug policy tends to obscure the human side of it. Underpinned by concepts and such as in “prison populations” and “seizures” drug control hides from our view the people targeted by drug control, and as a result we might run the risk of overlooking the harms caused by inadequate policies.

To listen to the seminar, click here

To download the book, click here

In the best interests of the child? Children, drugs and the law

In September 2011 The International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy delivered two lectures at Guangxi University in China. Damon Barrett’s lecture was about children, drugs and the law, focusing on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. His prezi slides are below.

Children of the Drug War: Specialty Seminar at LSE

The Mannheim Centre for Criminology is holding a speciality seminar to mark the publication of Children of the Drug War by Damon Barrett.

When? Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 6 :00-7 :30 pm.

Where? Moot Court Room, 7th floor, New Academic Building, Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Chaired by Damon Barrett

Speakers: Jennifer Fleetwood – Mothers and Children of the Drug War : A View from a Women’s Prison in Quito, Ecuador.

Steve Rolles – After the War on Drugs : How Legal Regulation of Production and Trade Would Better Protect Children

Michael Shiner – Taking Drugs Together: Early Adult Transitions and the Limits of Harm Reduction in England and Wales

About the book

Children of the Drug War is a unique collection of original essays that investigates the impacts of the war on drugs on children, young people and their families. With contributions from around the world, providing different perspectives and utilizing a wide range of styles and approaches including ethnographic studies, personal accounts and interviews, the book asks fundamental questions of national and international drug control systems:

•What have been the costs to children and young people of the war on drugs?
•Is the protection of children from drugs a solid justification for current policies?
•What kinds of public fears and preconceptions exist in relation to drugs and the drug trade?
•How can children and young people be placed at the forefront of drug policies?

For further details see http://www.childrenofthedrugwar.org/

About the speakers

Damon Barrett is Senior Human Rights Analyst at Harm Reduction International.

Jennifer Fleetwood Is Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Kent.

Steve Rolles is Senior Policy Analyst at the Transform Drug Policy Foundation.

Michael Shiner is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics.

RSVP: If you are planning to attend please let Michael Shiner know (m.shiner@lse.ac.uk)

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