HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH Drugs and Human Rights As drug trafficking has spread around the world, with ever more countries affected by the production, shipment and consumption of psychoactive drugs, national and international counternarcotics programs have also proliferated. Unfortunately, these programs by and large have escaped close human rights scrutiny. In early 1995, Human Rights Watch began a multi-year effort to document and challenge human rights violations caused or exacerbated by efforts to curtail drug trafficking internationally as well as in the United States. Although Human Rights Watch takes no position on the merits of counternarcotics objectives, we have insisted that those objectives — like all national and international political goals — be pursued within the framework of internationally recognized human rights. By raising our findings and concerns with the media, policy analysts, public officials and the general public, Human Rights Watch presses for the incorporation of human rights considerations into the drug policy debate. In July 1996, the Human Rights Watch report, Race and Drug Law Enforcement in the State of Georgia, excerpted from Modern Capital of Human Rights?: Abuses in the State of Georgia, was released as the first international human rights assessment of any anti-drug policies in the United States. Drawing on computerized statewide databases, the study statistically documented stark racial disproportions in the arrest and incarceration of Georgia’s drug offenders. Our data analysis for the years 1990 to 1995 revealed that while both black (principally African-American) and white Georgia residents used and distributed drugs, black residents were far more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses. Black residents were arrested for cocaine-related offenses at seventeen times the rate of whites. Blacks were arrested for drug possession at rates greatly exceeding their estimated share of the total drug-using population; the arrest rate for whites was, conversely, much lower than their share of the drug-using population. Blacks arrested for drug offenses were imprisoned at twice the rate of whites. A black eligible for a life sentence for drug offenses was five times more likely to receive it than an eligible white; as a consequence blacks received 98 percent of the life sentences imposed for drug offenses. International human rights law affirms racial equality and condemns conduct that has an unjustifiable racially disparate impact. Assessing whether the harsh impact of drug law enforcement on blacks in Georgia contravenes human rights guarantees requires scrutiny of its goals and methods. In our analysis of racially disparate arrest rates, for example, Human Rights Watch concluded that the rates reflected the comparative advantages for the police in making drug arrests in low-income neighborhoods in which drug transactions were easier to detect and for which there is strong community and political pressure. Such reasons are scant justification, however, for discriminatory arrest patterns. We urged Georgia to assess its drug goals and policies and to consider alternatives to current patterns of criminal law enforcement that would reduce adverse racial disparities while continuing to respond to social concerns about public drug dealing and drug abuse. In the southern hemisphere, we continued to monitor closely the human rights implications of anti-narcotics programs in Bolivia that were supported and funded by the United States. Several positive developments tracked recommendations made in our 1995 report, Bolivia: Human Rights Violations and the War on Drugs. Bolivia enacted legislation in early 1996 to reform provisions in the country’s drug law which we had criticized for containing glaring violations of human rights principles; name tags began to be provided to anti-drug police to end the anonymity which had hindered identification of those who committed abuses; and the Ministry of Justice established a human rights office in the coca-growing region of the Chapare, as we had urged, so that victims of abuses had a more reliable mechanism for reporting abuses. In May 1996, following new research conducted in the Chapare, we published a second report on abuses connected with Bolivian policies of drug law enforcement. Bolivia Under Pressure: Human Rights Violations and Coca Eradication, is a detailed study of the violence and human rights abuses that accompanied Bolivia’s effort to meet the coca eradication goals imposed by the United States. The report includes a series of specific recommendations for steps the Bolivian and U.S. governments could take to improve the performance of the Bolivian narcotics police. A few months after the report was released, the U.S. and Bolivian governments signed letters of agreement covering U.S. anti-drug assistance to Bolivia. The agreements included human rights provisos that followed closely most of the recommendations made by Human Rights Watch. The agreements called, for example, for the development of regulations for proper police search and arrest procedures; for police training emphasizing human rights and providing courses in crowd and riot control to minimize the potential for violence and personal injury; and for the development of a police internal affairs office to investigate, discipline or recommend for prosecution police who violate basic human rights standards. Continued United States government support for Bolivia’s anti-narcotics programs was made conditional on “regular and measurable progress” toward these goals. Salary supplements paid to Bolivian anti-drug personnel by the United States may be withdrawn if “there is reason to believe” the recipients have engaged in human rights violations. In the latter part of 1996, we prepared a set of generic recommendations for conditions that should be incorporated into all decisions concerning anti-narcotics assistance to Latin American governments and began work to secure their adoption by the Clinton administration. For additional information regarding the Human Rights Watch special initiative on drugs and human rights, please e-mail Associate Counsel Jamie Fellner at fellnej@hrw.org