Drug Control Strategies Must Respect Human Rights

As the member States of the United Nations gather at this Special Session of the General Assembly to consider measures to strengthen cooperation to reduce drug trafficking, Human Rights Watch urges attention to the dismaying human rights consequences of many current anti-drug strategies. The General Assembly should affirm unequivocally the international community's determination that human rights must not be sacrificed in the pursuit of counternarcotic goals. All national and international drug control strategies must be designed and implemented within the framework of full respect for universally recognized fundamental rights.

Human Rights Watch Calls on the member States attending this Special Session to: insist that all national and international drug control strategies be developed within the parameters of full respect for human rights. to include in their assessment of diverse possible drug strategies a consideration of their likely impact on human rights. to direct the UNDCP to incorporate human rights into its work, by including an assessment in its world report of the status of respect for human rights in countries' drug control efforts; by adopting respect for human rights as a criterion for its world-wide drug demand and supply reduction activities and programmes, and by ensuring that human rights requirements are fully incorporated into the legal assistance it provides.

We recognize, of course, the importance of drug control objectives to the international community. The harms associated with drug abuse have galvanized concern around the world. We also acknowledge the widespread dismay and frustration over the magnitude of drug consumption, the drug trade and associated crime. These have lead to an understandable but nonetheless unacceptable temptation to ignore laws and principles that might be deemed impediments to successful drug control. As Justice Hugo Black of the United States Supreme Court cautioned prophetically years ago: "Grave evils such as the narcotics traffic can too easily cause threats to our basic liberties by making attractive the adoption of...forbidden shortcuts that might suppress and blot out more quickly the unpopular and dangerous conduct."

Unfortunately, Human Rights Watch's research indicates that such forbidden shortcuts have been adopted all too frequently. Drug control efforts in many countries incorporate measures counter to the rights and basic dignity of those accused of drug consumption, sales and trafficking as well as of people with no connection to the drug trade. Many anti-drug tactics trample rights of life, liberty and, privacy, the right to fair trial, and the right to be free of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Such human rights violations are either authorized by national law or, although unlawful, constitute a common practice committed with impunity by state agents. Examples are legion:

• Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are executed each year for drug offenses, often --as in China--following trials that are notoriously lacking in due process protections for the accused. Drug offenders face the death penalty in China, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam and the United States. The quantities of drugs that trigger death sentences can be small: in Vietnam selling as little as one hundred grams of drugs can be punished with death; in Singapore the sale of a mere half an ounce of heroin or 500 grams of marijuana carries a mandatory death sentence.
• Egregious punishments short of the death penalty are also meted out. Thailand's prisons are crowded with persons serving life sentences for single low-level offenses, such as carrying a packet of drugs. In the United States, a single sale of two ounces of cocaine is punished in the state of New York with a maximum sentence of life; in the state of Michigan possession for sale of a little more than a pound of cocaine for sale is punished with life in prison with no parole.
• Abusive tactics by law enforcement agents seeking to apprehend individuals involved in the drug trade abound: in the U.S. police batter down the front doors of innocent families on the basis of tips from paid informants, beat up drug suspects, plant evidence. Bolivian antinarcotics agents burst into the homes of farmers in coca growing areas, conducting illegal warrantless searches, intimidating and terrifying the inhabitants, stealing possessions. Thousands of Bolivians suspected of involvement with the drug trade have been arrested arbitrarily and detained without charges for periods that exceed legal mandates. In Iran drug suspects face torture.
• Trial procedures are distorted and legal safeguards protecting the rights of defendants and suspects are jettisoned for drug cases. In Colombia, drug defendants are tried by faceless courts. In Ecuador, the right of habeas corpus is suspended for drug suspects. In Bolivia, the presumption of innocence is mocked by a blanket prohibition on pre-trial release for all drug defendants.

In some countries, most notably the United States, human rights violations pervade anti-drug law enforcement. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws deprive judges of the ability to tailor fair sentences proportionate to the conduct and culpability of drug defendants. They must send minor figures in the drug trade to prison for cruelly long periods while major traffickers negotiate their way to freedom. People who have not been convicted of any crime find their property confiscated under forfeiture laws that swell police coffers. Police cordon off entire neighborhoods and search anyone they choose; high school students are randomly tested for drugs; helicopters with heat detection capabilities explore the interiors of people's homes; drivers are pulled over on highways and searched because they fit drug courier profiles that include racial characteristics. Indeed, racial minorities have been arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for drug offenses at staggeringly high and disproportionate rates that devastate their families and communities. Grossly overcrowded jails and prisons house hundreds of thousands of convicted drug offenders.

The record of human rights violations committed by States in the name of drug control should be cause for grave concern to the international community. So to should be the failure of international entities devoted to drug control to give appropriate recognition to universally recognized human rights in their work. We question, for example, how officials of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP) can praise drug control efforts in countries such as China and Iran without also criticizing their notorious reliance on unfair trials, torture, prolonged pre-trial detention, forced confessions, executions and other human rights abuses as part of those efforts. We question how the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) can call on member states to curtail expression favoring drug use without even mentioning the free speech guarantees of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

The international community should not permit a de facto drug exception to ICCPR and other global and regional human rights instruments. There can be no justification for failure to respect the rights and basic dignity of those accused of drug consumption, sales and trafficking--much less of the wider public of innocent bystanders to the drug trade who nonetheless also find themselves subject to drug control-related abuses.

Conflict between drug control and human rights is by no means inevitable. Strategies that emphasize treatment and education to reduce demand, for example, pose less risk to human rights than strategies that emphasize criminal prosecutions and prison. Human Rights Watch does not challenge any State's decision to use the criminal law in its effort to curtail drug abuse and trafficking. To an extent far greater than other drug control policies, however, the use of the criminal law and sanctions implicates--and hence is subject to--important human rights constraints.

Moreover, we believe that full respect for the rights and dignity of each person and strict adherence to the rule of law will strengthen anti-drug efforts. It is well known that drug traffickers can corrupt the machinery of justice and undermine the rule of law. Insufficient international attention has been paid, however, to the consequences of abusive drug control efforts. Where state agents ignore the law or legislators craft laws that distort basic principles of justice in the name of drug control, they undermine the legitimacy of both the state and its objectives. Disregarding the human rights of one set of citizens--however laudable the goals ostensibly being pursued--diminishes the consolidation of public recognition of the human rights of all. In short, vitiating the rule of law in the name of drug control may inflict long-term damage to the integrity of constitutional nations.

There are many who seriously question whether prohibition-based law enforcement strategies to combat drugs have caused more harm than drugs themselves. Human Rights Watch cannot assess the social, political and health consequences of these strategies. But our mandate compels us to address their human rights consequences. A world still trying to honor in practice the rights acknowledged fifty years ago in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must be vigilant to defend the progress it has made. The international community cannot condone abusive governmental power, repression and injustice even in the name of drug control.

In conclusion, Human Rights Watch on the member States attending this Special Session to:

• insist that all national and international drug control strategies be developed within the parameters of full respect for human rights.
• to include in their assessment of diverse possible drug strategies a consideration of their likely impact on human rights.
• to direct the UNDCP to incorporate human rights into its work, by including an assessment in its world report of the status of respect for human rights in countries' drug control efforts; by adopting respect for human rights as a criterion for its world-wide drug demand and supply reduction activities and programmes, and by ensuring that human rights requirements are fully incorporated into the legal assistance it provides.

8 June 1998