Drugs and human rights
A world-first ‘post-human rights’ framework for drug policy: Improving social, economic and health outcomes
2021-2024
Since the early 1960s, international treaties have characterised certain drugs as illicit, prohibiting their use, possession and supply. However, global drug policy is currently undergoing a seismic shift. In early 2019, the heads of all thirty-one United Nations agencies released a communiqué calling for the decriminalisation of drugs and a move away from ineffective penal approaches. Importantly, the call for change noted that reforms must be shaped by human rights. The latest International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy recommend that all countries undertake a ‘transparent review’ of existing drug laws and policies for their compliance with human rights, and subject all proposed new drug legislation to human rights ‘assessment’.
While these calls are welcome, they assume that human rights provide an effective framework to guide reform and that human rights will enable less punitive approaches to drug use. However, human rights do not always work this way. Seventy years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, people who use drugs still endure human rights abuses, such as forced drug treatment and forced drug withdrawal. If human rights are an effective framework to prevent punitive approaches towards people who use drugs, why haven’t they prevented such practices up until now?
With new Australian drug laws in some jurisdictions now required to comply with human rights frameworks, this four-year research project is being undertaken in order to learn more about:
- How human rights have informed Australian drug policy in the past
- What ideas about drugs and the human have shaped these approaches
- Whether such ideas are problematic or outmoded
- Whether human rights provide the best framework for guiding legal and policy reform in relation to alcohol and other drugs – and if not, what alternatives, such as a ‘post–human rights’ framework, might look like.
Summary report
Human rights and drug policy: Summary report of project findings and recommendations
This report details findings and recommendations from an Australian Research Council-funded project entitled ‘A world-first “post-human rights” framework for drug policy: Improving social, economic and health outcomes’.
The project’s key findings and recommendations are summarised in this report across four thematic areas:
- Australia’s approach to drug policy and human rights
- Parliamentary perspectives on human rights and drug law, policy and practice in Australia
- Expert perspectives on the value of human rights for drug law, policy and practice
- Human rights and stigma
View the report launch:
Associated publications
- Mulcahy & Seear (forthcoming) Are we human or are we dancer?: Sex, drugs, and bodies of law
- Zuluaga (early online) Ontopolitically-oriented research on coca growing: Integrating decolonial knowledges and Latina feminisms
- Mulcahy & Seear (early online) A culture of rights finding its feet: Parliamentary human rights scrutiny in the Australian Capital Territory
- Mulcahy & Seear (early online) Mournful mothers and damaged damsels: Are we really listening to women during parliamentary human rights scrutiny?
- Mulcahy & Seear (2024) Imaging people who use drugs: How parliamentary actors picture and tell stories about the subjects of drug law reform
- Mulcahy & Seear (2024) Searching for performance in the legal archive: On the fragments and petrified remnants of parliamentary human rights scrutiny
- Mulcahy & Seear (2024) The Victorian and Australian Capital Territory human rights charters and the absence of a right to health
- Mulcahy & Seear (2024) ‘The tribunes of the people, the tongues o’ the common mouth’: Parliamentarians are representatives when scrutinizing laws
- Seear (2024) Shifting solutions: Tracking transformations of drugs, health and the ‘human’ through human rights processes in Australia
- Seear & Mulcahy (2024) Forging new habits: Critical drugs scholarship as an otherwise to rights
- Seear & Mulcahy (2024) Making kin with more-than-human rights: Expert perspectives on human rights and drug policy
- Seear (2023) Making addicts: Critical reflections on agency and responsibility from lawyers and decision makers
- Mulcahy & Seear (2023) A ‘tick and flick’ exercise: Movement and form in Australian parliamentary human rights scrutiny. Dance
- Mulcahy & Seear (2023) Making and breaking ‘bad’ habits in drugs, law and human rights scrutiny
- Mulcahy & Seear (2023) Backstage performances of parliamentary scrutiny, or coming together in parliamentary committee rooms
- Mulcahy, Seear, Fraser, Farrugia, Kagan, Lenton, Elphick & Holas (2022) Insurance discrimination and hepatitis C: Recent developments and the need for reforms
- Seear & Mulcahy (2022) Making rights and realities: How Australian human rights make gender, alcohol and other drugs
- Mulcahy and Seear (2022) On tables, doors and listening spaces: Parliamentary human rights scrutiny processes and engagement of others
- Mulcahy and Seear (2022) Playing to the gallery: The invocation of human rights, legal actors and outside audiences in debates on roadside drug testing in the Australian Capital Territory
- Seear and Mulcahy (2022) Enacting safety and omitting gender: Australian human rights scrutiny processes concerning alcohol and other drug laws
Funding
This project is funded by the Australian Research Council: FT200100099.
Website
For latest information on the project, please visit the Gender, Law and Drugs Program website and Twitter.