This video looks at the violation of human rights of people who use drugs in Central America, and we have Lisa Sánchez from the Transform Drug Policy Foundation with us. Hello Lisa. HI, how are you? What can you tell us about the human rights situation of drug users in Mexico and in Central America? In our countries, the human rights situation is disastrous, not only for drug users but also for many people involved, in one way or another, in the drug phenomenon and most of all in the illicit drug phenomenon. Especially in Mexico and in Central America we can observe a series of serious violations of these people basic rights, and this at several levels. First, their right to health is violated: our countries do not have a system or sufficient services to address the needs of people who could become problematic users or even get addicted. Generally, the treatment centers where we send and lock up, this is the right word, drug users in our countries are facilities which get out of the sanitary control of the State, which receive no kind of economic support from the state, where therapeutic strategies have not been certified, are not science-based, and where we witness cruel, inhuman treatments, where people are crammed, where many people live in unhealthy places and where we can even find torture, sexual abuses. We can also observe isolation phenomenons where families are not allowed to visit patients; we observe involuntary internments against the best advice, even against the WHO opinion and conventions on the rights of people with a disability opinion, for instance in the case of people with psychiatric co-morbidities who are interned against their will, even their legal personality is taken from them which is totally illegal in our constitutional framework. We also notice there is a strong criminalisation from our countries security forces who extort users to not arrest them and pass them off as dealers, who arrest them, lock them up even in countries where drug use is not necessarily classified as a crime, we pass them off as dealers and imprison them with disproportionate sentences, which is another human rights violation that we have noticed. Crimes against health, this is how we call them in Mexico, or drug offences at large in many other countries, involve sentences which are not at all proportionate to the harm inflicted neither to the person nor to the third parties, and for instance, in many of our countries, drug trafficking is sentenced with stronger criminal sanctions than rapes of minors or murder. We are then facing a difficult situation where on one side we do not offer enough health facilities or interventions, and where on another side we have a wide variety of totally disproportionate punishments which also violate other human rights such as freedom, the right to a fair trial, the right to information, which are not necessarily represented with other behaviours, and this is obviously linked to the stigmatisation weighing on drugs and drug users. We did also see and do some strategic litigation to prove that there are some violations of the right to privacy when a state wants to impose a unique healthy life model which implies no drug use at all. We have also observed violations of traditional practices of indigenous people which go against international conventions on cultural, social and environmental rights. We noticed that some courts have mostly criminalised women who use drugs, therefore there are significant legal implications for them such as the loss of parental authority over their children or an incarceration with a sentence also disproportionate compared to the offense. To all this, one must add a war on drugs strategy which, especially in Mexico, is militarised, and so we even witness extreme situations in the context of this war where human rights are violated such as extrajudicial executions or enforced disappearances, in which State stakeholders play a part in this illegal deprivation of life which as the first human right should be ensured by all the States and government of the region, but it is not the case. Thank you very much for your insight full account of what the situation is like for people who use drugs in your region, thank you. Thank you.
