From the 13th to the 21st March, UN member states gathered in Vienna for the annual Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND). This year’s meeting included a High Level Segment in which countries reviewed (the lack of) progress made in drug control over the last five years, and agreed a Joint Ministerial Statement to reflect the challenges and ways forward.

Negotiations on this Statement ran for more than seven months, with countries unable to reach consensus on core issues such as harm reduction, the death penalty, and preparations for the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs. In the end, the final Statement ended up being another bland ‘as-you-were’ outcome from these multilateral discussions – something that was reflected in the relatively low turn-out from high-level officials (there were no Heads of State present, and few senior ministers).

But the statements and discussions at the meeting itself told a different story – one of a strained consensus, increasing frustration, and more open questioning of current policies. During the High Level Segment, statements from Switzerland, Uruguay, Norway, Guatemala, France, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Portugal, India and others all pointed towards the need to develop a health- and human rights-based approach to drug control. Ecuador went even further, calling for a reform of the drug control treaties: “The current UN drug system needs deep changes… We should not believe that one country or that one policy is enough to beat the problem… We need to demilitarise the current approach and accept social and cultural uses within a framework that respects human rights. Ecuador exhorts the world to be focussed on human beings not the substances”.

At the end of the High Level Segment – having failed to secure progressive language on the death penalty in the Join Ministerial Statement due to resistance from Iran, Pakistan, China and others – the European Union made an “interpretative statement” on behalf of 58 countries to declare their condemnation of capital punishment for drug offences. A responding statement from Iran, supported by more than 10 other countries, then stated that “the death penalty is not under the mandate of the CND… It is a criminal matter to be decided by each sovereign state… The death penalty serves as a deterrent against drug trafficking”.

During the ‘normal’ part of the CND meeting the following week, the debates and bad feeling were clearly persisting. In the Committee of the Whole (where individual resolutions are negotiated and adopted by consensus by Member States), frustrations were clear as Pakistan, Egypt and others continued to block any progressive language (even trying to renegotiate text that had been directly copied from the Joint Ministerial Statement, approved just a few days before). Resolutions this year covered topics as varied as recovery, ketamine, education and austerity – and the Russian Federation also submitted one on the role of sport and the ‘Olympic Ideal’ in drug prevention! But each resolution was subjected to tortuous debate, editing and obvious obstructionism.

As a result, the CND negotiations went right to the wire. The resolution outlining preparations for the 2016 UNGASS on drugs was the subject of fierce discussion and debate behind closed doors for much of the week, and compromise was eventually reached late on Friday 21st – long after most of the 275 NGOs present at CND had left.

The reason for the debate was that a number of countries – principally those from Latin America – wanted to make sure that the 2016 UNGASS was allowed to be “a broad and diverse debate without roadblocks or taboos” (in the words of Uruguay), a reference to the frustrations experienced with the Joint Ministerial Statement and the CND in general. The flash-points in the resolution focused on the role of CND in 2016, the role of other UN agencies and bodies, the role of civil society, and the physical location of the preparations (Vienna or New York). In the spirit of consensus – which permeates the proceedings at CND – language was eventually found to appease countries on both sides (the Chair threw off his headphones and everyone applauded when this was finally achieved).

Overall, it is important to look beyond the specific battles over individual paragraphs in resolutions – because the sense of frustration and dissatisfaction in Vienna was tangible and is clearly increasing over time. In a press conference, the UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov was asked how CND can claim there is a consensus on drug policy, when the use of certain drugs can lead to execution in one country and be completely legal in another. He glibly replied, 

It is a broad consensus”. But even that broad consensus is under increasing strain in the build up to a major review of the current approach in 2016.

For more details about CND, please click on the following items:

organised at CND, in particular on West Africa, cannabis regulation in Uruguay and the USA, the OAS reports on drug policy, modernising drug law enforcement, scheduling, etc.

CND 2014: Disappointing outcomes but the debate is heating up

The HCLU’s Drugreporter is launching a video campaign to debunk the offensive of the International Narcotics Control Board against drug policy reform initiatives.

The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) is almost as old as the global drug control system itself: it was created in 1961, the year when the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was signed by UN member states. This treaty banned the non-scientific and non-medical use of some drugs (other than those popular in Western societies).

The INCB was created to monitor the implementation of the treaty and to ensure that illicit drugs are available for pain medication. The Single Convention is now more than 50 years old, but has never been evaluated. Without evidence to support the policies based on this convention, it has become dogma - holy text recited at the annual meetings of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) - light-years away from the reality on the streets. The original purpose of the convention – to protect public health and human rights – has been obliterated.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Debunk the INCB! – Video Campaign

Governments will convene in Vienna for the next ten days for the 57th Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) and its High Level Segment. They will meet to discuss the status of drug control and many will attempt to reaffirm the status quo and restate their commitment to a ‘drug-free’ world. But for the first time it is expected that a few other brave governments will no longer have the stomach to go along with this charade, and will openly question the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to drugs that has relied so heavily on law enforcement and supply reduction measures at the expense of human rights, public health and rational evidence-based policy making.

Today, at last, we can talk of real, actual legal reforms on drug policy that are outside the prohibitionist paradigm that has been dominant for so long.

In December 2013, Uruguay became the first country to make cannabis available to adults for recreational use, with the government regulating cannabis production, trade and sale. Two states in the USA, Washington and Colorado, have voted to create legally regulated cannabis markets, and Colorado began cannabis sales through licensed shops on 1 January 2014.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Fractured beyond repair: The charade of a global consensus on drugs begins to unravel

Article originally published at Matters of Substance.

Today, at last, we can talk of real, actual legal reforms that are outside the prohibitionist paradigm that has been dominant for so long.

Demand for legal recreational cannabis in Colorado was so high in the first week of the year that many shops allegedly ran out of stock – although this is likely to calm down after the initial rush.

In New Zealand, Parliament approved the Psychoactive Substances Act 2013, which came into force last July to regulate and control less harmful new psychoactive substances rather than blanket ban all new ‘legal highs’, placing an emphasis on limiting harms to users while meeting demand. This was a brave and innovative step that acknowledged the inevitable futility of indiscriminately scheduling all new substances and criminalising their production, trade and use – a strategy that has not deterred users or those seeking to make lucrative profits from the drug trade by introducing ever-evolving new, and potentially more harmful, ‘legal highs’.

These developments are unparalleled in terms of how progressive and bold policy makers have been in breaking away from the global consensus on punitive prohibition, and it seems certain now that the positive trend is irreversible – in particular, with respect to cannabis.

These changes ‘on the ground’ provide a dynamic new backdrop to the global debates on drug policy that are happening at the United Nations (UN). The next UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs will now take place in 2016 – 3 years earlier than originally planned, at the behest of Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico (supported by 95 other member states through a UN resolution). A UN special session is the biggest international governmental forum for discussing issues of concern to the global community.

The impetus for pushing for an earlier UNGASS on drugs followed growing calls for reform from across Latin America at the highest political level. Many Latin American countries have paid a high price for enforcing the war on drugs, spending millions of dollars trying to stem the flow of drugs out of the region but to no avail and with devastating consequences in terms of security, human rights, development and public health.

In 2012, frustrated with the high economic and human costs of these largely ineffective efforts, Colombia’s Juan Manuel Santos and Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina, both sitting presidents, openly questioned the underlying premise of the dominant approach to international drug control and called for a debate on alternatives. This unprecedented development not only led to the rescheduling of the UNGASS but also the release of a groundbreaking report from the Organization of American States (OAS) in May 2013. The OAS report highlights the need for a serious rethink of drug policy and outlines options for the full decriminalisation of drug use and the legal regulation of cannabis.

The OAS process set the wheels in motion for taking this debate beyond the hemisphere. At the UN General Assembly in October last year, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and President Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica added their voices to those of Santos and Pérez Molina by calling for more effective responses to drug trafficking based on promoting public health, respect for human rights and harm reduction. All four presidents united in calling for an open and wide-ranging debate leading up to the 2016 UNGASS.

While it’s clear the existing consensus is breaking and there is a growing desire to find viable alternatives to the War on Drugs, there are still powerful countries who are staunchly opposed to any kind of reform. The stark reality of these tensions will be played out next month in Vienna (the UN seat of international drug policy) when there will be a special high-level meeting (just before the annual meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs). This meeting is the culmination of a mid-term review of progress against the last international agreement on drug control – the 2009 Political Declaration and Plan of Action on the world drug problem. The review process began some months ago with the negotiation of a Joint Ministerial Statement that will be adopted in March. This statement will set the scene for the upcoming UNGASS, so the final debate in Vienna on 13–14 March will be interesting.

An early draft of the statement was leaked to the press in November, and the divisions between those governments supporting more progressive approaches and those opposing change were apparent. For those working in the field of drug policy, the political lines were predictable – many European Union countries, Switzerland and some Latin American governments promote progress towards reform while China, Pakistan and the Russia Federation argue fiercely for the status quo and a strong reaffirmation of the existing commitment to the achievement of a drug-free world.

The inclusion of the words ‘harm reduction’ remains a contentious issue. In the negotiation of the 2009 Political Declaration, this was hard fought and unfortunately lost, although a coalition of 25 member states made it clear they would interpret the compromise language of ‘related support services’ to mean harm reduction. Human rights is another area that creates tension, with more inflexible governments still questioning the primacy of the human rights instruments over the implementation of the drug control conventions. Meanwhile, calls for an end to the use of the death penalty for drug offences are met with firm resistance from China.

Yet there is one important and definite difference between these negotiations and the preceding ones – the position of the US has fundamentally changed. No longer among the hardliners, the US has acknowledged, both at the UN but also more recently domestically, that the over-reliance on incarceration has failed. In August 2013, US Attorney General Eric Holder admitted that mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences were ‘draconian’ and that too many Americans had been imprisoned for too long for no good law enforcement justification. He made it clear that the status quo was unsustainable and damaging.

The domino effect of cannabis regulation at state level, with Alaska very likely to be next this year following Washington and Colorado (and several more states have concrete plans in the pipeline), makes the US less sure-footed of condemning other countries for not stringently adhering to a zero-tolerance approach. Cannabis regulation for recreational use is outside of the scope of the current UN treaty framework for drugs, which does create a technical problem for the US (although so far they have managed to avoid any real condemnation from other governments) and also for Uruguay. The International Narcotics Control Board, however, has weighed in on both developments and publicly chided the US and Uruguay for contravening the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, which lists cannabis in the same schedule as heroin and cocaine.

The status of cannabis within the UN treaty system is on the agenda of the next World Health Organization Expert Committee meeting later this year, after which there could be a recommendation to change its current place within the schedules. While wholesale revision of the UN conventions does not seem like an imminent possibility, it is an issue that is becoming more awkward. At the 56th Session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), which took place in March 2013, Uruguay, Argentina, Guatemala and the Czech Republic alluded to the need for treaty reform. One country has managed to renegotiate its terms of engagement with the treaty system – in 2013 Bolivia readhered to the 1961 convention with a reservation on the coca leaf, having withdrawn from the treaty a year earlier.

It is not yet clear what exactly can be expected from the UNGASS, but as we move towards 2016, the so-called ‘Vienna consensus’ on drugs will be no more. The divisions between governments on this issue have become too visible to ignore and the UNGASS is a perfect opportunity for an honest assessment of the evidence that reflects the changing tone of the drugs debate. At this juncture, it would be naïve to say the War on Drugs is over, but a retreat from some of the harmful and repressive aspects of this war has undoubtedly begun.

Sounding the drug war retreat

Although marijuana remains illegal in the Netherlands, in 1976 the Dutch government began tolerating retail sales of small amounts by so-called coffee shops. Thirty-eight years later, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), a U.N. agency that describes its mission as “monitoring and supporting Governments’ compliance with the international drug control treaties,” is still complaining about that policy. In its latest annual report, issued this week, the INCB notes that the Dutch “tolerance policy” (

) “allows small amounts of cannabis to be sold and abused.” (INCB officials, like hardline drug warriors everywhere, define all recreational consumption of marijuana as abuse.) According to the INCB, such tolerance is intolerable: “The Board reiterates its position that such ‘coffee shops’ are in contravention of the provisions of the international drug control conventions.”

If the INCB does not like Amsterdam’s cannabis cafés, which are technically illegal, you can imagine how it feels about Denver’s state-licensed pot shops. Actually, you don’t have to imagine. INCB President Raymond Yans, never one to hold back criticism of governments he deems insufficiently zealous in suppressing the consumption of arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants, spells it out in black and white. “We deeply regret the developments at the state level in Colorado and Washington, in the United States, regarding the legalization of the recreational use of cannabis,” he writes. “INCB reiterates that these developments contravene the provisions of the drug control conventions, which limit the use of cannabis to medical and scientific use only.”

The “developments” to which Yans refers involved the elimination of certain criminal penalties by ballot initiative, which he says the U.S. government should not allow. Yet under our federalist system, states have no obligation to punish everything Congress decides to treat as a crime, and the drug control treaties say compliance is subject to “constitutional limitations.” So Yans is blowing smoke when he says the U.S. government is legally required to impose marijuana prohibition on recalcitrant states, something it has no power to do under our Constitution.

More generally, observes Richard Elliott, executive director of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, “The INCB’s claim that its narrow, restrictive interpretations of the [drug control] conventions override domestic constitutional law cannot stand in light of the actual wording of the conventions.” The board’s insistence that all countries conform to its reading of the anti-drug treaties, regardless of what their own laws say, is of a piece with the INCB’s zero-tolerance scolding, the escalation of which may signal a worldwide re-evaluation of the never-ending, always failing war on drugs.

Although the INCB seems to see its role as whipping countries into line when they stray too far from the proper prohibitionist path, that function was not part of its mandate when it was created by the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961. “The INCB was created to oversee the flow of narcotics internationally, making sure that countries can meet their licit requirements for essential pain medicines while monitoring to ensure that licit supplies don’t seep into the illicit market,” says John Collins, coordinator of the International Drug Policy Project at the London School of Economics. “The INCB fundamentally was created as a number-crunching and technocratic body that is supposed to provide technical assistance for international control efforts in a cooperative way. Its current role as global enforcer or ‘guardian’ of the treaties, as they like to call themselves, is not mentioned in any treaty.” Beginning in the 1970s, Collins says, the United States and other “ideologically prohibitionist states” transformed the INCB into a bully pulpit dedicated to promoting their agenda. As a result, he says, the board “is consistently willing to overstep its treaty mandate and advocate a set of policies that have no basis in either science or treaty law.”

A recent INCB position paper, for example, criticizes the Supreme Court of Canada for “permitting a ‘drug injection room’ to continue to operate in Vancouver.” The INCB is referring to Insite, a nonprofit, government-subsidized clinic where addicts inject drugs under medical supervision. Insite, which does not supply drugs and offers addiction treatment along with health care, aims to reduce overdose deaths, the transmission of blood-borne diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis, and other medical problems associated with unsafe injection practices. A 2011 study published by 

 found that overdose deaths had fallen by 35 percent in the neighborhood near Insite since the clinic opened, compared to 9 percent in Vancouver as a whole. “Insite saves lives,” the Canadian Supreme Court declared that year. “Its benefits have been proven.” The court ordered the federal health minister to continue granting Insite an exemption under Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act so that addicts could use it without fear of arrest.

That ruling was based on the court’s interpretation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “The court said that the government had violated [drug users’] constitutional rights to security of the person, to liberty, and to life by denying [the] exemption,” Elliott says. “In other words, to extend a blanket criminal prohibition on drug possession so far as to even criminalize people using a health facility such as Insite is to violate human rights and is unconstitutional because it is overly broad and because it has a grossly disproportionate impact on the health of people needing such a service. These are fundamental principles of justice that form part of Canada’s constitutional law, and therefore any obligation alleged to exist under the drug control conventions is subject to them.”

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs says compliance is subject to “constitutional limitations” and undertaken with “due regard to [signatories’] constitutional, legal and administrative systems.” The 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances and the 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances contain similar provisions. The 1988 treaty says a country’s criminalization of possession for personal use is “subject to its constitutional principles and the basic concepts of its legal system.”

Furthermore, as noted in a 2002 memo from lawyers at the U.N. Drug Control Program (now subsumed by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime), harm reduction programs like Insite can be defended as fulfilling the treaty obligation to “treat, rehabilitate and reintegrate drug addicts.” Such efforts, the memo says, also would be consistent with a U.N. resolution calling for policies aimed at “reducing the adverse consequences of drug abuse.” Yet the INCB insists there is no such leeway, because safe injection sites “promote social and legal tolerance of drug abuse.”

The INCB takes the same stance regarding “safer crack kits,” which typically include a glass stem, a rubber mouthpiece, and brass screens; they sometimes also come with hand wipes, alcohol swabs, and lip balm. Richard Elliott’s organization explains that the kits are intended to “reduce the risk of burned or cracked lips and the associated risk of becoming infected with blood-borne viruses such as HCV or HIV.” But according to the INCB, governments that allow the distribution of such kits, like governments that tolerate safe injection sites, are failing to meet their treaty obligations.

“There is no legal basis for that position,” says Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Global Drug Policy Program. “The drug control treaties limit certain drug-related activities to medical and scientific purposes. Public health is the driving ethos behind heroin-assisted therapy and supervised consumption rooms. This organization’s discomfort with harm reduction is ideologically driven, and it has nothing to do with the drug control treaties.”

If harm reduction is apt to irk the INCB, how can a country win the board’s praise? Ask the Saudis. In last year’s annual report, the INCB saluted “the commitment of the Government of Saudi Arabia to comply with its obligations under the three international drug control conventions to which it is a party” and commended “the country’s government agencies involved in drug control for their commitment and efforts in the fight against drug abuse and drug trafficking.” Those efforts include cutting off the heads of drug traffickers, which the Saudi government did at least 82 times in 2011, according to a 2012 report from Harm Reduction International.

When that organization asked about the INCB’s position on the death penalty for drug offenses, the board was suddenly keen to respect “internal law,” which it deems irrelevant in the context of harm reduction and marijuana decriminalization. “The determination of sanctions applicable to drug-related offences,” the INCB said, “remains the exclusive prerogative of each State and therefore lie[s] beyond the mandate and powers which have been conferred upon the Board by the international community.”

About those powers: Does it really matter what the board says? Maybe not, says Alex Kreit, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law who specializes in drug policy. “I think it’s telling,” he says, that the INCB “references decades-old policies in the examples of things it dislikes: coffee shops, safe injection sites, medical marijuana laws. The INCB has complained for years about these things, but at the end of the day, that’s really all it can do. It doesn’t have any direct enforcement authority over parties to the Single Convention. All it can do is say ‘you’re out of compliance’ and, at worst, recommend that other treaty parties stop the import/export of drugs to the countries it doesn’t like. As a result, I believe the more statements like this that the INCB puts out, the sillier it makes itself look.”

As drug war dissent mounts, U.N. agency rails against reforms it cannot stop

“Member states are encouraged to consider abolishing the death penalty for drug-related offences”, says Raymond Yans, President of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), which recently discussed the issue of the imposition of the death penalty for drug-related offences.

INCB reiterates its position highlighted in its Annual Report for 2003 which stated that “Capital punishment is neither encouraged nor prohibited by the international drug control conventions”.

INCB encourages States to consider the abolition of the death penalty for drug - related offences 

A global shift from drug enforcement to prevention and treatment could save billions of dollars annually as national anti-narcotics agencies struggle to curb a growing supply of readily available but illegal drugs, a report from a drug-monitoring group suggests.

“Most studies have shown that for every dollar spent, good prevention programs can save governments up to $10 in later costs,” the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) said in a report released on Tuesday. “Therefore, governments’ investments in prevention, treatment and rehabilitation programs, and their regulatory control systems, must be maintained — even in times of financial austerity.”

The INCB released its 45th annual report on Tuesday, focusing on a two-pronged approach of increased prevention and treatment to combat drug abuse worldwide and highlighting the emergence of new, previously unknown synthetic derivatives designed to skirt domestic drug law. The organization, an “independent, quasi-judicial” monitoring body with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), argued that increased efforts to prevent drug addiction, as well as treat those already addicted to illegal substances could save governments money in the long run.

INCB preaches prevention and treatment to tackle drugs in its latest report

Six new INCB members will be elected on 23-25 April 2014. The list and bios of the candidates is now available below (including candidates nominated by governments, and those nominated by the World Health Organization).

Candidates for INCB membership renewal now nominated

The INCB Annual Report was launched in Washington DC. The Report clearly condemns Uruguay's decision to legally regulate cannabis markets last December. In his foreword to the report, Yans calls these policies “misguided”, somewhat more diplomatic then accusing Uruguay of a “pirate attitude” and telling Washington and Colorado to “stop this nonsense” as he did on other occasions. In response, Ambassador Milton Romani (Uruguay's Permanent Representative at the Organisation of American States) released his comments, available below, in Spanish.

Milton Romani responds to INCB attack on Uruguay

At the launch of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) annual report on 4 March 2014 in London, INCB President Raymond Yans finally acknowledged the relevance of international human rights principles to the implementation of the UN drug control treaties. Mr. Yans stated that member states are " encouraged to avoid using the death penalty" and "to consider the abolishing of the death penalty for drug-related offences". He explained that the conventions outline examples of measures which could be implemented in response to activities such as drug trafficking, including "alternative measures to punishment for drug-related offences of minor nature." However the death penalty is not mentioned as a possible response measure in the drug control treaties, and in fact, "global United Nations standards and norms in criminal justice...and relevant international conventions on human rights" encourage member states to avoid using the death penalty.

In a clean break with convention, where the INCB had previously refused to support abolition of the death penalty (refer links to articles below), the INCB President has now clarified the Board's position in support of abolition of the death penalty, confirming that he was not simply stating his personal opinion but the position of the INCB: "it's not my words, it's the words of INCB or the Board in its February session".

 to listen to the podcast of Mr. Yans' statement and the transcript of his remarks on the INCB's position on the death penalty.

Bangkok Post, INCB neutral on capital punishment

Human Rights Watch, Letter to the International Narcotics Control Board on Capital Punishment for Drug Offences

Huffington Post, When the UN Won't Condemn Torture You Know Something's Very Wrong

INCB calls on member states to abolish the death penalty for drug offences

The Board does not decide whether cannabis should be downgraded in the schedules.

UN’s International Narcotics Control Board(INCB) unprecedented condemnation of the use of death penalty for drug-related offences is welcome if long overdue. The bigger question is whether INCB’s consideration of human rights can be extended into a proper human rights and evidence-based examination of UN’s entire drug control regime.

Asked about the death penalty for drugs offences at the launch of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) annual report, President Raymond Yans of the INCB said, “well I may have news for you…”. And news he had:

“The INCB, taking into account the relevant international conventions on human rights, the various protocols, the various resolutions of the General Assembly, of the ECOSOC, and of UN human rights bodies concerning the death penalty, we encourage state parties, part of the conventions, that still provide for the death penalty for drug-related offences in their national legislation and practice it, to consider the abolishing of the death penalty for drug-related offences.”

So far the INCB had categorically refused to take a position, not just on the death penalty, but in fact on any human rights violation, arguing – as Damon Barrett remarked – that criminal sanctions are the “exclusive prerogative” of states. Two years ago, the previous INCB president pressed on the question of the death penalty said that such matters are not within the mandate of the INCB as the drug treaties do not specify which sanctions are acceptable and which ones are not. Indeed, as Steve Rolles of Transform tweeted in response to this breaking news: “Before today the only supervised injecting room the INCB were unwilling to condemn was an execution suite.”

Yans also made clear that this stance against capital punishment for drug offences was not just his own opinion, but a new position of the entire INCB agreed at its most recent February session. The change in the Board’s position comes at a particularly delicate moment, as political negotiations in Vienna this week are still in a stalemate over several paragraphs in the Ministerial Statement which should be be adopted at the High Level Segment of the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs (CND) on 13 to 14 of March. One of those contested paragraphs deals exactly with the issue of abolishing the death penalty for drug-related offences.

Yans also noted that the only place in the international human rights conventions where drugs are actually mentioned, is article 33 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which seeks to protect children from the illicit use of drugs. Yans cited this article to support INCB’s condemnation in their report of the establishment of regulatory regimes for cannabis in US states and in Uruguay, not only because they “contravene the text, objective and spirit of the treaties (namely, to preserve the health and well-being of mankind)” but also because they “would have a serious impact on the health of their populations, particularly young people” (for example paragraph 340).

In the case of Uruguay’s historic moves towards cannabis regulation, Yans said, the dialogue about this had been “difficult” and he hoped to embark soon on a mission to Montevideo to “better explain the conventions” to the Uruguayan authorities. In his foreword to the report, Yans calls these policies “misguided”, somewhat more diplomatic then accusing Uruguay of a “pirate attitude” and telling Washington and Colorado to “stop this nonsense” as he did on other occasions. Still, it is one thing to point at legal tension with the treaties, for which the INCB has a mandate, and another to speculate without any evidence base about the health and social consequences and to accuse the government of neglect of concern for the welfare of its people. For Yans to claim that moral high ground in name of the Board is completely out of place and unacceptable.

What he could do to stop the trend towards cannabis regulation? The INCB, he said, is not a decision making body but a monitoring one, “we don’t have sanctions, but member states do”. The Board will submit a report about developments in those countries to ECOSOC, and if the conclusion is that there is a serious threat to the functioning of the international control system, ECOSOC could decide to impose sanctions concerning trade in scheduled substances. For a country like Uruguay sanctions could mean that access to essential painkillers could become more difficult, though such sanctions have never been applied and would be highly controversial.

When asked whether it’s time to revise the treaty regime and whether the 1961 Convention was now outdated, Yans responded: “Possible, but that is the responsibility of states, not of the INCB. We are mandated to monitor compliance to the treaties as they are now.” He also highlighted that the INCB does not decide whether cannabis should be downgraded in the schedules, the CND does, based on a WHO recommendation. He also said, “if countries think the treaty provisions are too tight they have the freedom to change them, but the overwhelming majority of countries is not willing to reform the conventions.” And he pointed to the upcoming moments of the CND high-level review next week and the 2016 UNGASS: that’s where that debate can take place.

Well, let’s have the debate there then. It is long overdue.

INCB takes a new step towards the protection of human rights by encouraging member states to consider the abolition of death penalty for drug-related offences.

INCB speaks out against death penalty

Today, Tuesday 4th March 2014, the INCB Annual Report for 2013 was launched in London. Below is the podcast of the event.

During the event, Mr. Yans made a clear statement on the use of the death penalty for drugs offences:

About the death penalty… well I may have news for you. You should know, remember, that capital punishment is neither encouraged nor prohibited by the international drug control conventions, which don’t refer to death penalty under provisions related to penalties given the case of drug trafficking. The conventions just give some examples, such as imprisonment, other forms of deprivation of liberty, pecunary sanctions, confiscation for drug traffickings, or alternative measures to punishment for drug-related offences of minor nature. That’s the material which is in the conventions; the death penalty is not inside the conventions, it is not referred to inside the conventions. However under the global United Nations standards and norms in criminal justice, states are encouraged to avoid using the death penalty. I’m not talking here about drugs, I’m talking in general, it’s the general trend inside the United Nations system. INCB, taking into account the relevant international conventions on human rights, the various protocols, the various resolutions of the General Assembly, of the ECOSOC, and of UN human rights bodies concerning the death penalty, we encourage state parties, part of the conventions, that still provide for the death penalty for drug-related offences in their national legislation and practice it, to consider the abolishing of the death penalty for drug-related offences. So I read to you the text of the decision, so that it’s not my words, it’s the words of INCB or the Board in its February session.

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