Penal Aspects of the UN Drug Conventions (original) (raw)
The United Nations and Drug Policy: Towards a Human Rights Based Approach (With Prof Manfred Nowak)
In 1945, the United Nations was established to 'save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.' Today, the language of war has been adopted for policy objectives. The 'war on drugs' is now more widespread and higher in financial and human cost than ever, and has impacted negatively across borders and across human rights protections. In much the same way as the 'War on Terror,' the war on drugs has left in its wake human rights abuses, worsening national and international security and barriers to sustainable development. Although UN bodies have never officially endorsed the term, for many human rights, public health, HIV and drug policy reform advocates - and for many of those on the front lines of the war on drugs, including indigenous people, farmers, people who use drugs and service providers - the United Nations drug control system is seen as a significant part of the drug problem, rather than part of the solution. We argue that the aims of international drug policy must be revisited in line with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and the binding normative framework of human rights. We argue further that the UN drug conventions are insufficient, alone, as a legal framework for the complex issue of drug policy and that human rights law must be recognised by the relevant organs of the UN as a part of that framework. The implications of this 'expanded' legal framework for the current pillars of international drug policy are then considered as are the human rights obligations of the drug control entities, and their possible future roles in the promotion and protection of human rights. Barrett, Damon and Nowak, Manfred, The United Nations and Drug Policy: Towards a Human Rights-Based Approach (August 25, 2009). THE DIVERSITY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW: ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF PROFESSOR KALLIOPI K. KOUFA, pp. 449-477, Aristotle Constantinides and Nikos Zaikos, eds., Brill/Martinus Nijhoff, 2009
Challenging the UN drug control conventions: problems and possibilities
International Journal of Drug Policy, 2003
Increasing numbers of sovereign states are beginning to review their stance on the prohibition based UN drug control conventions. Recent years have seen nations implement, or seriously discuss, tolerant drug policies that exploit the latitude existing within the legal framework of the global drug control regime. With efforts to implement pragmatic approaches to drug use at the national level, however, comes the growing recognition that the flexibility of the conventions is not unlimited. It seems that the time is not too distant when further movement within states away from the prohibitive paradigm will only be possible through some sort of change in or defection from the regime. This article suggests that efforts to implement treaty revision are fraught with difficulties. It will be shown how the UN procedures permitting revision of the conventions allow nations supporting the current prohibition based system, particularly the United States of America, to easily block change. The article argues that such systemic obstacles may lead parties wishing to appreciably expand policy space at a national level to consider a form of treaty withdrawal. It is suggested that such action by a group of like-minded revision oriented states may be sufficient to trigger a weakening of the regime. The article contends, however, that total withdrawal would be a problematic option, not least because it would have serious consequences for the entire international treaty system.
Inter se Modification of the UN Drug Control Conventions
International Community Law Review, 2018
Inter se modification of the UN drug control conventions An exploration of its applicability to legitimise the legal regulation of cannabis markets Draft-International Community Law Review
The Case for International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Control
This special section of Health and Human Rights Journal examines some of the many ways in which international and domestic drug control laws engage human rights and create an environment of enhanced human rights risk. In this edition, the authors address specific human rights issues such as the right to the highest attainable standard of health (including health protection and promotion measures, as well as access to controlled substances as medicines) and indigenous rights, and how drug control laws affect the protection and fulfillment of these rights. Other authors explore drug control through the lens of cross-cutting human rights themes such as gender and the rights of the child. Together, the contributions illustrate how international guidelines on human rights and drug control could help close the human rights gap—and point the way to drug laws and policies that would respect, protect, and fulfill human rights rather than breach them or impede their full realization. Next year marks the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational instrument of the modern system of international human rights law, a system now underpinned by nine core UN treaties and multiple regional conventions. The growth of the international human rights regime has provided a critical tool to address the abusive and unaccountable exercise of state power. Multilateral treaties on drug control predate the foundation of international human rights law by several decades. Beginning with the 1912 International Opium Convention and evolving through a series of conventions adopted under the auspices of the League of Nations, drug control was already a well-established subject of international law by the time the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration in 1948, and the first UN drug convention in 1961. 1 The preamble of that treaty, the Single Convention on
European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research
The cross-border character of the designer drugs crimes forced the UE countries to cooperate in criminal prosecution. At first sight, in European Union law, there are proper instruments to enforce such cooperation. The Framework Decision on the European Arrest Warrant introduces the model of cross-border prosecution and abandons the requirement of double criminality in case of the group of the 32 crimes, listed in the Article 2 (2) of the FD EAW. The question is whether such a simple variant of EAW (without checking double criminality) may be enforced in designer drug cases. The work presents an argumentation that the normative meaning of Article 2 (2) of the FD EAW has to be established under European and international law. As long as a particular new drug is not internationally recognized as 'psychotropic substance' or 'narcotic drug', its trafficking cannot be treated as one of the 32 crimes, mentioned above.
How well do international drug conventions protect public health?
The Lancet, 2012
The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961 aimed to eliminate the illicit production and non-medical use of cannabis, cocaine, and opioids, an aim later extended to many pharmaceutical drugs. Over the past 50 years international drug treaties have neither prevented the globalisation of the illicit production and non-medical use of these drugs, nor, outside of developed countries, made these drugs adequately available for medical use. The system has also arguably worsened the human health and wellbeing of drug users by increasing the number of drug users imprisoned, discouraging eff ective countermeasures to the spread of HIV by injecting drug users, and creating an environment conducive to the violation of drug users' human rights. The international system has belatedly accepted measures to reduce the harm from injecting drug use, but national attempts to reduce penalties for drug use while complying with the treaties have often increased the number of drug users involved with the criminal justice system. The international treaties have also constrained national policy experi mentation because they require nation states to criminalise drug use. The adoption of national policies that are more aligned with the risks of diff erent drugs and the eff ectiveness of controls will require the amendment of existing treaties, the formulation of new treaties, or withdrawal of states from existing treaties and re-accession with reservations.
Towards Global Governance: The Inadequacies of the UN Drug Control Regime
AJIL Unbound, 2020
Human rights and the UN drug control regime have long had an uneasy relationship, which is evident today in the tensions that exist between criminal justice reform advocates, the institutions of the UN drug control regime, and economic interests that stand to benefit from decriminalization and legalization efforts. The UN drug control regime's relationship with human rights cannot be properly discussed without acknowledging its colonial and racist roots. From the earliest agreement on drug control in 1909, born out of the crisis of opium dependency caused by the forced opening of China to trade in opium by the British, to the 1988 United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, which was a product of America's war on drugs, international efforts to regulate drugs have never been for the benefit of those who have suffered the most from both the supply of drugs and its criminalization. The war on drugs has been a global war from...
Fixing Transnational Drug Policy: Drug Prohibition in the Eyes of Comparative Law
Journal of Law and Society, 2019
Drug prohibition allows us to study over a significant period of time how penal provisions framed at a supranational level flow, settle and unsettle across different countries. At a time of growing doubt about the benefit of criminalisation of drug use, it also provides a case study as to how epistemic communities may rely on comparative research to identify best practices and promote them as normative alternatives in the face of a long entrenched legal dogma. In order to explore these issues, this article looks at the UN drug control system from the perspective of comparative law. It shows how the concept of legal transplant provides a useful tool to understand the limits of transnational criminal law designed on a global scale to tackle the ‘drug problem’, and it clarifies the various types of legal comparison that might contribute to addressing this failed transplant.