I'd like to introduce you to the International Human Rights System. In an earlier video, you will have seen and I hopefully, you will have read about the development of the International Drug Control Regime. It's important to realize that that doesn't sit on its own in the international system and that lots of different legal regimes have built up over time. For this section, the most important for us is the human rights system, which developed in parallel to the drug control system. By parallel I mean, parallel they didn't really connect such that human rights principles don't come into the drug control treaties. I would encourage you to read the drug control treaties. It's surprising how many people study drug policy or work in drug policy and haven't read them. It's good to read through them. It can be a bit boring but it's well worth doing. The human rights system developed as people may know in the wake of World War II. It developed started with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 but from that, we developed many binding human rights treaties. Two of the most important are called the Covenant and Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights. These made legally binding a lot of the standards that were in the Universal Declaration. They also well-worth reading. From then, there are a number of thematic treaties for example on torture, on children's rights, on women's rights, on racial discrimination and all of these have application for drug control. So, it's worth looking at this the international legal regime, all of these treaties can be read online and there's lots of writings about them. The parallel development of these systems really only came together with activists and NGOs bringing them together to say there is a relationship between international drug control law and international human rights law and we need to unpack those relationships. I'd like to introduce you to one a way of doing that, which is three different interactions between international drug control law and international human rights law. I'll call these complementarities, places where they share their goals, tensions, which I'll explain in more detail, and conflicts, okay? An example of a complementarity would be access to essential controlled medicines. In human rights law we have a concept of the right to health, the right to the highest attainable standard of health in fact, and a part of that is access to essential medicines. So, here you can see a complimentary norm on the drug control side and on the human rights side. Now, you will have seen in an earlier video, I trust that there are problems with access to essential controlled medicines. But here, the right to health can bolster and provide a human rights support to that aspect of the drug control regime. Now, tensions are a bit different. This is where states have obligations in drug control law to do things at national level, to do things on the ground. In the implementation of those obligations, human rights problems can arise. So, an example of a tension would be something like crop eradication. The obligations to eradicate, say for example, cannabis plants or the coca plant. The way that's carried out can carry considerable human rights risks, but it doesn't mean that the requirement to do so is automatically a conflict with human rights. But there are examples of direct conflicts where human rights law and current drug control requirements in the international system can't really co-exist. I would argue that one of those is the ban on certain indigenous and cultural practices in the Single Convention on narcotic drugs of 1981. Since the 1960, international law around cultural rights and indigenous rights has increase significantly. The kind of ban on those practices that was put in place in the 60s and really agreed earlier than that, likely would not pass today. It would likely breach what are now considered longstanding norms around free prior and informed consent of indigenous peoples but also the right to practice your culture under the covenant on civil and political rights. So, those are three ways of looking at the relationship between these two legal regimes. You can look for the complementarities and try and maximize those. You can look for the conflicts and discuss the ways that one of these systems has to change to fix them. You can look at the tensions and you can use international legal methods to resolve those tensions in favor of human rights. I'd like to talk in this video about a debate around the nature of human rights abuses in relation to drug control. But let me start by saying this, in an earlier video I asked you to look at human rights treaties and again I would advise you to do that, and once you do it you can pick any human right that you read there and it can be connected to a problem in drug control very easily. So, for example, the right to life and the fact that 33 states or territories retained the death penalty for drug offenses. We can talk about the right to privacy and strip searches in schools for drugs, or the ban on private behavior, for example. We can talk about religious freedom and the ban on the use of cannabis by the Rastafiri, for example, or indigenous rights and the ban on the use of the coca leaf. We could look at freedom from arbitrary detention and drug detention centers in Southeast Asia, or the freedom from cruel inhuman and degrading treatment and the use of police violence to extort from air to extract information or extort money from suspects. Of course, the right to health and the denial of harm reduction services such as needle and syringe programs methadone and so on. Pretty much any human right you want can be connected to a problem in drug control, and what's interesting is that for those that argue for reform and that those that argue against drug law reform, everybody agrees that these abuses are taking place, nobody denies that. The nature of the disagreement that I want to talk about is to what extent drug control laws and international drug control treaties are part of that problem. On the one hand, there's the argument goes that, "Well, this is not a drug control problem, all of those human rights abuses are human rights problems that exist in those countries anyway." So, the death penalty, well, that's a death penalty problem. The police violence is an issue of police corruption and wider criminal justice problems in the country and that drug laws don't cause that. A lot of states and a few scholars hold to that reasoning. I don't, I would describe human rights abuses in drug controller as systemic, not just systematic which they are but systemic. I want to give two or three main reasons for why I think that's the case, and why that previous argument I think fails. The first is that for decades the drug problem or drugs problems, we should say, has been described as an existential threat. So, if we look at those treaties again, the drug control treaties, or if you listen to any political speech or read general assembly resolutions, you will see drugs described as a threat to security and a threat to the fabric of society as a social evil to be combated. Now, the problem is when you pitch any problem in that way, then it's very easy to justify repression, and it's very difficult to follow up with voting public with measures that seem progressive or somewhat counter-intuitive like harm reduction. A threat gets followed by law enforcement responses and heavy-handed responses to protect people from the very threat that was established. That's the first reason. I think there is a systemic problem, it's the narrative of drugs. The second though comes back to the drug control treaties, and the obligation states have. Now, I use these a bit as a proxy because our national drug laws are are widely modeled on that system, and they adopt the same strategies. What states are required to do under the current legal regime and the current theories and strategies of drug control carries inherent human rights risks. In an earlier video, I called these tensions between the treaty regimes, but we can call them human rights risks. So, for example, states have to arrest people. They have to prosecute them. They have to punish them in some way via prosecution. They have to eradicate crops. They have to seize property. They have to control people's behaviors via my own private behavior or religious behaviors or cultural behaviors. They have to control certain forms of expression via incitement laws and so on. These are all areas of considerable human rights risks. If somebody is going to be arrested, we need to know how that happened or if there was surveillance used or their privacy issues involved. If somebody is going to be prosecuted, we need to know what kind of trial they had or what kind of punishment was meted out. Again, we can raise the issue of the death penalty. There is good evidence and we will provide a link for this, an article that I wrote with my colleagues Rick Lines and Patrick Gallahue, that the amount of states or the number of states using the death penalty for drugs increased after the adoption of the drug trafficking convention in 1988. So, it can't be decoupled from this heavy handed approach, and that's the second part where I think the systemic argument is stronger. But it relates to a third one which is that how states measure success in drug control maps very well onto the kinds of indicators we use for human rights risk. So, states will measure success, for example, in the number of successful prosecutions. While coming back to the example of the death penalty, if a successful prosecution results in more people on death row or more people executed, then that is at the same time a success in drug control and a serious problem in human rights. Taking the current system, in fact, at face value, it should be a success that we have so many imprison for nonviolent drug offenses. It should be a measure of success but it's not, it's clearly a horrible human rights problem. So, that's my argument for why, in brief, for why I think the human rights abuses in drug control should be categorized as systemic. Again, we'll provide another link for a longer article on that.
