Saturday, 12 July 2008
 Earlier this week, 7-9 July, 300 delegates met in Vienna for the Beyond 2008 NGO Forum meant to provide civil society input for the 10-year UNGASS review. It was the culmination of a series of regional NGO consultations that took place over the past six months all across the globe. Given the wide range of views held by NGOs many –including myself- were sceptical about the outcomes of the process. Would it really be possible to agree by consensus on a joint declaration and resolutions? Well, we did it…
The chosen format for the Beyond 2008 meeting resembled a session of the UN
Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) where government delegates discuss
the world drug situation and adopt policy resolutions. Observers from
NGOs and international organizations are allowed to attend. This time
it was the other way around. In the same conference hall, NGO delegates
negotiated resolutions and government representatives were allowed as
observers.
As was to be expected, many issues triggered complicated debates, but
after a first worrying day gradually a mood of consensus-seeking
started to grow. Where sharp disputes appeared in the plenary, the
issue was deferred to an informal drafting group to come up with
compromise language. In those corridor meetings long and sometimes
tense negotiations took place on issues such as harm reduction,
definitions of ‘drug use’, ‘illicit use’, ‘misuse’ and ‘harmful use’,
the involvement of most affected groups including drug users in policy
making, the unintended negative consequences of the current drug
control system, the eradication of drug-linked crops in absence of
viable development alternatives, etc.
The draft texts on the table were based on the outcomes of the regional
consultations and excluded some issues that had proven to be too
controversial or had not been raised in the preparatory process for
other reasons. The attempts to incorporate new paragraphs led to some
frustrations, as tabling new proposals was postponed until finishing
the existing draft, by when no time was left to discuss them. This
happened for example to paragraphs calling for a review of the current
drug control framework including a possible revision of the treaties,
calling for the UN drug conventions to be interpreted in a manner
consistent with UN human rights obligations, or calling for support to
declassify the coca leaf by taking it off the list of prohibited
substances.
Still, many other issues were thoroughly discussed and the ultimate
outcome is a set of recommendations containing clear harm reduction and
human rights language, calling for evidence-based, culturally and
socially sensitive approaches, calling for inclusion of all affected
and stigmatised populations, access to alternative livelihoods before
eradication, improved access to essential medicines under treaty
control, encouraging alternatives to criminal/prison sanctions,
analysing unintended consequences of the drug control system, taking
into account traditional licit uses, and many more. A remarkable
accomplishment that will impress many officials now involved in the
UNGASS review process as this can be presented as a consensus outcome
of NGOs from all around the world and from all different ideological
perspectives.
Already during the sessions there was serious interest and attendance
from UNODC as well as governments. UNODC Executive Director Antonio
Maria Costa, Namibian Ambassador Ms Selma Ashipala-Musavyi currently
President of the CND, and the French Ambassador on behalf of the EU all
addressed the meeting on the first day. Mr Costa challenged TNI
directly in his speech about our response briefing to the just-released
World Drug Report, saying that if we really think we have better data
we should put them on the table and we can have a rational debate about
it. A challenge we are happy to take up and we’ve started exploring
some options about how to organise that together with UNODC’s research
section. On the harm reduction issue, the careful listener to Costa’s
speech could hear some retraction about his support for harm reduction
in a number of recent speeches and papers. Someone must have leaned on
him to be more careful in his wording, which now included strong
emphasis on ‘abstinence’ as the overarching primary objective and
positive reference to the ‘ABC’ principle developed by the US as the
basic principles for HIV/AIDS prevention (“Abstinence, Be faithful,
Condoms”).
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US government 'Observer', in black, conferring with two of the US-based zero-tolerance groups |
The CND President, who took off on a rather outdated note talking about
a ‘drug-free world’ (she’s new to this…) stayed on to follow a
substantial part of the discussions which is very much appreciated.
Quite a few representatives from the Vienna missions showed up during
the meeting. A high US official stretched her ‘observer’ status to the
limit by working intimately together with the Drug Free America
Foundation, co-drafting amendments and immediately alerting whenever a
text appeared that conflicted with US policy principles.
There were definitely flaws and weaknesses in the process. One key
omission was the absence of farmer representatives or NGOs working on
cultivation issues in the regional consultations. There were very few
now at the forum, but it was clear all along that the focus was
primarily on drug use. The issues related to cultivation, production,
conflict or development were therefore largely absent from the
discussion. The Global Forum of Producers of Crops Declared to be
Illicit, to be held in January 2009 in Barcelona, can hopefully fill
this gap and still present a number of recommendations from the far
other end of the chain to the March 2009 high level CND meeting where
the UNGASS review process will come to its conclusion.
Still the Beyond 2008 Forum was a most worthwhile exercise with
substantial debate, newly found common ground and unexpected outcomes.
The Vienna NGO Committee, especially Michel Perron and David Turner who
guided the proceedings, and Mirella Dummar Frahi who played a key role
as UNODC liaison person, deserve applause for making all this happen.
TNI – Martin Jelsma
For the occasion of the Beyond 2008 NGO Forum, TNI published an overview of its work over the past decade: Ten Years - TNI Drugs & Democracy Programme 1998-2008 (PDF)
Check out the website of the Vienna NGO Committee for the reports of
the regional consultations, and a nearly finished version (only failing some technical editing) is available here.
The International Harm Reduction Association (IHRA) and the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have written daily blogs about details of
the proceedings.
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