www.paxmundi.info - Weblog

By Jessica Davies

On Sunday 28 February, a major conflict took place in the Chiapan community of Mitziton, when around one hundred members of the evangelical ‘Army of God’, widely seen as a paramilitary group, attacked Other Campaign supporters in the community. Over 200 police attended, in ten police lorries, and the road between San Cristobal and Comitan was closed for many hours. Each side took three members of the other side
hostage, and several people received bullet wounds from the guns of
the Army of God or were beaten up. Huge fires were lit, and
ambulances were prevented from getting in to treat the wounded.

A statement from the community assembly tells how Other Campaign adherents were tied to   poles blindfolded and left like this for twelve hours, “they were brutally beaten and tortured while they poured gasoline over them, saying ‘we are going to burn you alive’ ”. Agents of the State
Preventive Police “were already in place, but when they heard the
shots did nothing. They only approached when the aggression was
over”. Government officials who were present “did nothing, (more…)

On Monday 22^nd and Tuesday 23^rd of February in Mexico City, political figures, academics, social scientists, security experts, and activists from at least six countries came together for the Winds of Change: Drug Policy in the World conference sponsored by the Mexico City-based Collective for an Integrated Drug Policy (CUPHID). Coming as Mexico’s war on drugs turns bloodier by the day, the conference unsurprisingly concluded that current prohibitionist policies are a disaster.

“The principal conclusion is that we need a more integrated drug policy based on prevention, scientific evidence, and full respect for human rights,” summarized CUPHID president Jorge Hernandez Tinajero. “It remains clear that, yes, there exist alternatives to the current strategy.”

In a press release after the conference, CUPHID emphasized the following points:

The so-called war on drugs has failed and, without doubt, we need “winds of change” to advance toward alternative policies to address the problematic of drugs across the globe.

The prohibitionist paradigm has been ineffective, and furthermore, for the majority of countries it has implied grave violations of human rights and individual guarantees, discrimination, and social exclusion, as well as an escalation of violence that grows day by day, ever broadening the scope of impunity for organized crime.

Drugs are never going to disappear. Thus, a more realistic drug policy should focus on minimizing the harms associated with drug use — overdoses, blood-borne diseases like HIV/AIDS, and violence. This concept is known as “harm reduction,” and must be the backbone of any drug policy. (more…)

By Frances Webber

Frances Webber, human rights lawyer, examines Lord Carlile’s Report on five years operation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Next month sees the fifth anniversary of the control order regime, introduced in haste in March 2005 after the strategy of internment, which applied only to foreign terror suspects, was declared unlawful and discriminatory. Now, control orders too are discredited for their reliance on secret evidence and their devastating impact on those subjected to them.

The fact that there have been so few control orders in the five years of their operation - forty-four in total - gives the misleading impression that those controlled must be truly dangerous. But the small number of orders doesn’t necessarily mean that the intelligence behind them is accurate. After all, not many people were hanged for murder when the UK had capital punishment - but a significant proportion of those who were judicially murdered turn out to have been innocent. In the words of human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, ‘This may affect only a small group of people but in terms of its contribution to what one might call the folklore of injustice it is colossal.’ (more…)