By Phillip Smith
The United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs is set for UN Headquarters in Manhattan next week, and civil society and some European and Latin American countries are hoping to make limited progress in moving toward more evidence- and public health-based drug policies. But, knowing the glacial pace of change at the UN and well aware of how little of substance is likely to emerge from the UNGASS, some eyes are already turning to the post-UNGASS international arena.
Hopes for more forward movement at the UNGASS, always tentative and facing opposition from global drug war hardlinerssuch as Russia, China, and Singapore, were effectively dashed at the run-up meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting last month in Vienna, whose outcome documentwas described as “quite awful” by leading Canadian drug policy expert Donald MacPherson.
The outcomes document includes some minor progressive movement, but does not challenge the trio of treaties that form the legal backbone of global drug prohibition, while its embrace of “flexibility” emboldens regressive, repressive measures (the death penalty for drug offenses, forced “treatment,” criminalization of drug users) in hard line countries, despite being helpful for progressive reforms around the edges of the treaties’ prohibition.
MacPherson was one of a handful of international drug policy experts and elected officials who took part in ateleconference last week organized by StoptheDrugWar.org (publisher of this newsletter), a US-based group that has been deeply involved in civil society organizing around the UNGASS. He wasn’t the only one looking beyond 2016.
Mexican Senator Laura Angelica Rojas Hernández, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Organizations, called this year’s UNGASS poses “a step” toward examining the objectives of the 2009 Political Declaration and Action Plan on drugs, which will be reviewed in 2019. While the CND outcomes document had good language around the need for embracing multiple approaches, such as public health, human rights, gender, and prevention, it also includes serious shortcomings, she said.
“There is a lack of recognition of the relative efficacy of demand reduction and harm reduction policies and the absence of an acknowledgement of the high costs that the prohibitionist and punitive approaches have generated,” the senator said.
Mexican senators know all too well the high costs of drug prohibition. For the past decade, the country has been battered by brutal prohibition-related violence that has left at least 100,000 dead, tens of thousands more “disappeared,” a legacy of human rights abuses by soldiers and police fighting the cartels, and the legitimacy of the state severely weakened.
“The international community should continue to work toward the establishment of indicators that could help measure the impact of drug policies on people’s lives and their rights,” Rojas said, suggesting this could still happen at the UNGASS.
But she was also looking down the road.
“Something that should be placed on the table in 2019 is a thorough review of the three conventions on drug control that acknowledges the highly detrimental effects of the current approaches,” she said. “And we should be more honest about the so-called flexibility of implementation offered by these treaties and acknowledge that there should be a wider range of action for countries to define their own drug policies, taking into consideration their national and cultural context.”
Both Rojas and Canada’s MacPherson called for some sort of expert mechanism to guide policymakers eyeing the 2019 meeting.
“Organizations and even some governments are beginning to call for a mechanism post-UNGASS to get real with the modernizing of the treaties,” MacPherson said, reflecting frustration with the UNGASS process and prospects. “It’s really important that UN member states speak strongly for the need for that mechanism, whether it’s an expert committee or some other sort of group. And it needs to happen now — the next three years are critical coming up to 2019. We really do need to have that process in place to [counter] the kind of intransigence of other countries that use the consensus-based model to hold progress ransom.”
“The international community should examine the possibility of establishing an analysis mechanism as a working group of experts, for example, with a mandate to formulate recommendations aimed at the modernization of the international system of drugs for the 2019 review process,” Rojas added. “And from a longer-term perspective, we need to see the creation of a special office within the UN Human Rights Council, to follow up and monitor the respect of human rights in the context of the enforcement of the drug policies.”
The UNGASS hasn’t even gotten here yet, and interested observers are already looking past it. Welcome to politics at the United Nations where most things happen at a snail’s pace. The global drug prohibition consensus may be crumbling, but it is crumbling very slowly at the level of international conventions and institutions. The work continues.
[A follow-up story on prospects for marijuana legalization in Canada and Mexico will highlight remarks during the teleconference by Canadian Member of Parliament Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Aram Barra of Mexico United Against Crime, and StoptheDrugWar.org executive director David Borden.]
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