This TNI briefing aims at contributing to a better understanding of current market dynamics in Southeast Asia, essential for designing more effective and sustainable policy responses consistent with human rights and harm reduction principles.
Numerous UN conferences and summits have been devoted to negotiating a harmonized global approach to illicit drugs. Yet more and more cracks are now beginning to appear in the supposedly universal model which is, in reality, based on a highly fragile consensus.
Already widely reduced to statelessness and in many cases forced into camps for displaced people, an 800,000-strong population of Muslims in western Myanmar now faces increasing efforts to eradicate the very word they use to identify themselves as a group.
In many countries around the world, drug control efforts result in serious human rights abuses: torture and ill treatment by police, mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, denial of essential medicines and basic health services. Drug control policies, and accompanying enforcement practices, often entrench and exacerbate systematic discrimination against people who use drugs, and impede access to controlled essential medicines for those who need them for therapeutic purposes. Local communities in drug-producing countries also face violations of their human rights as a result of campaigns to eradicate illicit crops, including environmental damage, displacement and damage to health from chemical spraying.
De Fair, Green and Global Alliance ziet positieve punten in de brief die minister Ploumen van Handel en Hulp naar de Tweede Kamer heeft gestuurd over haar samenwerking met het ‘maatschappelijk middenveld’. Maar de FGG heeft ook kritiek. De brief wordt donderdag 17 oktober van 17.00 tot 19.00 besproken in het Algemeen Overleg van de commissie Buitenlandse Handel en Ontwikkelingssamenwerking.
The RAI principles do not move further in navigating the slippery terrain of defining ‘responsible’ versus ‘irresponsible’ investment - possibly resulting in them doing more harm than good. It is essential to push back against a regressive use of the principles and monitor what other actors are doing in the name of the principles.
