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4 –
Daily Update
– DAY TWO – Tuesday 21 April 2009
D
espite a growing shift in opinion that has seen even
traditionally conservative commentators begin to seriously
question the effectiveness of the ‘war on drugs’, this year’s
UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) in Vienna saw yet another
missed opportunity to seriously address issues of harm reduction.
There, deputy director of IHRA, Rick Lines, made a statement to
the commission about the UN’s silence on HIV prevention a decade
before at UNGASS, the subsequent explosion of HIV infection
linked to injecting drug use, and the fact that ‘obstructionist
governments’ were still blocking references to harm reduction in the
political statement this time around.
Why were these governments being so intractable? ‘In terms of
the CND process, that’s a good question,’ he says. ‘Some of those
governments have historically been very unfriendly, to say the least,
towards harm reduction and consistently blocked it. But what was
interesting at the high level discussions around the political
declaration this year was that there were governments who actually
support harm reduction domestically that, when push came to
shove and there needed to be a show of hands, opposed even the
most ridiculously meagre harm reduction language. We’re talking
about a reference in a footnote here.’
Does he have any optimism that things might improve? ‘I think
the one good thing that came out of the process this year was that
it really illustrated the degree to which the whole system is in a
shambles,’ he says. ‘CND is in an isolated bubble in the broader
UN when it comes to support for harm reduction, and it’s going to
Shifting the debate
To tie in with this morning’s plenary
session on human rights,
Daily Update
spoke to IHRA’s deputy director Rick
Lines about foregrounding drug policy
issues in the mainstream global
human rights agenda
be increasingly difficult for them to sustain that. It just makes them
look irrelevant.’
All of this is a symptom, he believes, of the way that drug policy
is refusing to engage with broader international realities. Where will
change come from – is it the NGO sector and drug activist
organisations that are helping to shape the agenda? ‘One of the
things driving our work at IHRA for the last couple of years is about
being able to mainstream drug policy throughout the international
multi-lateral agencies,’ he says. ‘We need to be putting those
issues in the context that other UN agencies can understand –
that’s the work we’ve been doing from the human rights end.’
The key is to engage with organisations like UNICEF and
UNAIDS and illustrate the ways in which drug enforcement has an
impact, he says. ‘It’s a question of how they can see drug policy
issues as relevant to their work. If we go to them just about drugs
they’ll quite rightly say “we don’t have a mandate to talk about
drugs”, but what we say is that these are human rights issues – the
right to health, the death penalty, extra judicial killings, torture – that
are directly relevant to their mandate, but driven by drug
enforcement. There are others, around the environment, with crop
eradication, and security and development, so the challenge is how
we wrap up a drug policy message in a way that places it firmly
within the mandate of other UN agencies, and increasingly make
the CND irrelevant.’
Human rights organisations, with notable exceptions, have been
accused of shying away from drugs issues, partly out of a
perception that it would be hard to mobilise public sympathy. Is
anything changing for the better here? ‘Definitely,’ he says. ‘We’re
starting to get high profile human rights bodies making statements
about drugs which will inevitably get people thinking about these
issues. One of the big things we’re working on at the moment is
with Amnesty International around June 26, the international day
against drug abuse and trafficking that a number of Asian
governments choose to ‘celebrate’ with executions. We’re looking
at advocacy strategies, hooking up drug user activist and harm
reduction organisations on our end with the anti death penalty
groups and human rights groups that that Amnesty works with. ’
Foremost among ‘antagonist governments’ have traditionally
been Russia and the US. But the new American administration is
already taking a different approach to needle exchange
programmes than its predecessor. Does he think things might
genuinely change for the better? ‘Well it couldn’t be any worse,’ he
says. ‘The US delegation expressing support for needle exchange
was one of the things that minimised the CND process this year,
and that public statement was very much driven by civil society
organisations – on the one hand the US delegation was still
maintaining this incredibly hard line against harm reduction when
the new administration was publicly supportive of needle exchange,
and US harm reduction groups did a lot of good media work which
made the Obama administration sit up and take notice.’
Though it ultimately had no impact on the content of the
international declaration, it could prove to be a watershed moment,
he believes. ‘In terms of US policy – specifically US policy as a
donor country – it potentially opens up huge opportunities to direct
funding away from abstinence-only type approaches towards harm
reduction. It’s a significant shift – not as significant as we all
wanted, or think is merited, but we shouldn’t underestimate the
impact it could have.’