Human Rights and Drug Policy

Prepared by Fay Watson, then Secretary General of EURAD, for the International Symposium on Drug Policy and Public Health in Istanbul.

The paper starts from a hard fact: international drug policy is marked by episodic and sometimes severe human-rights violations. Those violations are increasingly used as an argument to reframe or dismantle the international drug-control architecture. Watson’s counter is that such infringements are not prescribed, condoned or encouraged by the drug-control instruments themselves.

Nothing in the conventions requires imprisoning people who use drugs, or blanket incarceration. States must restrict drug abuse and may apply sanctions — but may also provide treatment in lieu of those sanctions. Blame for rights abuses, the paper argues, sits primarily with member states’ own justice systems.

The only explicit reference to drugs in the core human-rights treaties is Article 33 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child: children must be protected from illicit use of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, and from being used in production and trafficking. The PDF sets out further categories of violations linked to production, trafficking and use.