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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.’ Read the rest of this entry »

It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil’in’s land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route.

This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. For those of us inOfer , imprisoned for our protest against the wall, this victory makes the suffering of being here easier to bear. After actively resisting the theft of our land by the Israeli apartheid wall and settlements every week for five years now, we long to be standing along side our brothers and sisters to mark this victory and the fifth anniversary of our struggle.

Ofer is an Israeli military base inside the occupied territories that serves as a prison and military court. The prison is a collection of tents enclosed by razor wire and an electrical fence, each unit containing four tents, 22 prisoners per tent. Now, in winter, wind and rain comes in through cracks in the tent and we don’t have sufficient blankets, clothes, and other basic necessities. Read the rest of this entry »