Tim Bingham, Irish Press Ombudsman upholds complaint from coalition of drug services

CASE SUMMARY

Irish Press Ombudsman upholds complaint from coalition of drug services International Harm Reduction Association and Others and The Irish Independent

Tim Bingham analyses the complaint upheld by the Press Ombudsman of Ireland against the Irish Independent, the country’s largest circulation broadsheet. The complaint was filed by the International Harm Reduction Association, the Irish Needle Exchange Forum and the CityWide Drugs Crisis Campaign, with the support of approximately thirty Irish drugs services and professionals.

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Sandra Ka Hon Chu, Supreme Court of Canada orders Minister of Health to exempt supervised injection site from criminal prohibition on drug possession, Human Rights and Drugs, Vol.2, No.I, 2012

CASE SUMMARY

Supreme Court of Canada orders Minister of Health to exempt supervised injection site from criminal prohibition on drug possession Attorney General v. PHS Community Services Society, 2011 SCC 44 (Supreme Court of Canada)

Sandra Ka Hon Chu analyses the decision by the Supreme Court of Canada which ordered the federal Minister of Health to grant Insite, North America’s first supervised injection site, an extended exemption from the criminal prohibition on drug possession in the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA), thus permitting the health facility to continue to operate. In its September 2011 decision, the Court held that while the CDSA provisions were applicable to Insite as valid exercises of the federal government’s criminal law power, the Minister’s refusal to extend Insite’s CDSA exemption violated the Canadian constitution.

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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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Yingxi BI, On the Death Penalty for Drug-Related Crime in China, Human Rights and Drugs. Vol. 2, No. I, 2012

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the death penalty for drug-related crime in China. It considers the basis upon which China applies the death penalty for drug-related offences, and the debates surrounding the imposition of the death penalty for drug-related offences from the perspective of both penology and human rights. Based on the evidence discerned about China’s current situation, the article discusses the possibility of China abolishing the death penalty for drug-related crime in the future.

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Kenneth W. Tupper & Beatriz Caiuby Labate, Plants, Psychoactive Substances and the International Narcotics Control Board: The Control of Nature and the Nature of Control, Human Rights and Drugs, Vol.2, No.I, 2012

ABSTRACT

This article reviews and critiques the International Narcotic Control Board’s (INCB) 2010 Annual Report’s recommendation about plant materials containing psychoactive substances. It first provides an overview of the United Nations drug control system, then contextualises the INCB’s role in the UN system. Through a reading of the text of the INCB’s 2010 Report and references to contemporary practices of ayahuasca drinking based in fieldwork, the article shows how this Report fits into the international paradigm of the war on drugs and its conflicts with human rights. It is argued that the Board’s recommendation demonstrates an unwarranted attempt to extend the scope of its powers, conflates and thus misrepresents widely diverse plant materials and their effects, fails to distinguish between ‘use’ and ‘abuse’ of psychoactive substances and appears to assume that particular elements of culture—specifically, traditions involving psychoactive substance use—are, or should be, static, eternally frozen in time and place.

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Alex Stevens, The ethics and effectiveness of coerced treatment of people who use drugs, Human Rights and Drugs, Vol.2, No.I, 2012

ABSTRACT

In the context of international debates about ways to reduce the harms related to the use of illicit drugs and their control, this article explores the specific issue of coerced treatment of people who use drugs. It uses established standards of human rights and medical ethics to judge whether it is ethical to apply either of two types of coerced treatment (compulsory treatment and quasi-compulsory treatment,or QCT) to any of three groups of drug users (non-problematic users, dependent drug users and drug dependent offenders). It argues that compulsory treatment is not ethical for any group, as it breaches the standard of informed consent. Quasi-compulsory treatment (i.e. treatment that is offered as an alternative to a punishment that is itself ethically justified) may be ethical (under specified conditions) for drug dependent offenders who are facing a more restrictive penal sanction, but is not ethical for other people who use drugs. The article also briefly reviews evidence which suggests that QCT may be as effective as voluntary treatment.

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‘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

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‘Narco-Terror: Conflating the Wars on Drugs and Terror’, P. Gallahue, Essex Human Rights Review, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2011

The following article is a fascinating insight into the increasing conflation of the wars on drugs and terror and the implications for human rights.

It appears in the current special edition of the Essex Human Rights Review, which focuses on ‘Balancing Counter-Terrorism Efforts with Human Rights a Decade After 9/11′

All article are free to read online.

Abstract

Following 11 September 2001, the United States found itself at war with the Taliban, an enemy that heavily exploits the drug trade, narrowing the divide between the war on drugs and the war on terror  in both rhetoric and tactics, with dangerous implications for human rights. This paper discusses the implications of including drug offenders in the war on terror on fair trial norms, the right to liberty and security of person and the right to life, among other human rights protections. Even before the 2001 attacks on the United States, drug-related offences in countries such as Malaysia and Egypt had been included in emergency legislation meant to deal with threats to the State. Counter-terrorism legislation introduced since launching the  war on terror further blurs the distinction between drug-related offences and terrorism, thus leading to the diminution of human rights protections. The war on terror has presented many challenges to international human rights law. Conflating terrorism with new subjects such as drugs therefore has the potential to do further damage to recognised human rights norms.

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‘Drug Control, Human Rights, and the Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health: A Reply to Saul Takahashi’. Simon Flacks, Human Rights Quarterly

Human Rights Quarterly 33 (2011) 856–877

Abstract:

A recent article in this journal [Human Rights Quarterly] challenged claims that a human rights framework should be applied to drug control. This article questions the author’s assertions and reframes them in the context of socio-legal drug scholarship, aiming to build on the discourse concerning human rights and drug use. It is submitted that a rights-based approach is a necessary, indeed obligatory, ethical and legal framework through which to address drug use and that international human rights law provides the proper scope for determining where interferences with individual human rights might be justified on certain, limited grounds.

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Simon Flacks is a Ph.D. research fellow at the Empowerment Through Human Rights College, University of Vienna, Austria. He holds an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and formerly worked for the Child Rights Information Network (CRIN) in London.

He is a research associate with the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy

‘Mexico’s “War on Drugs”: Real or Rhetorical Armed Conflict?’ P. Gallahue, Journal of International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict, 2011

Journal of International Peace and Armed Conflict, Vol 24 1/2011, pp. 39-45

ABSTRACT

The author considers Mexico’s “drug war” to determine if the ongoing violence between authorities and drug cartels can be classified as an armed conflict, which would make the situation subject to international humanitarian law. Looking at several influential decisions that determined the existence of an armed conflict as well as a consideration of modern, so-called “anarchic” conflicts, the current crisis seems well suited for such a categorisation. However, classifying Mexico’s situation as an armed conflict would be inappropriate. Though sophisticated in some respects, these groups lack the organisation requirement and the violence unique to this crisis make this “drug war” a rhetorical war rather than a real armed conflict

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