Ensuring the safety and health of both prison staff, and people deprived of liberty, requires urgent action to reduce the risks and consequences of widespread COVID-19 infection. This advocacy note makes recommendations for reducing such risks and consequences, including by early release from, and suspension of arrests and admission into, prions, jails and other detention settings including drug rehabilitation centres in Southeast Asia.
With the Ministerial Declaration of March 2019 having ostensibly set the direction of international drug policy for the next decade or so,1 the launch of the 2019 World Drug Report only three months later was arguably surrounded by less expectation than the year before. Then, while missing the opportunity to provide a review of progress made in the 10 years since the Political Declaration,2 its contents still had the potential to feed directly into the deliberations surrounding the UN’s latest soft law instrument pertaining to drugs.
Held only three years after the 2016 United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on drugs, the event was a critical moment for member states to define the next decade of UN drug policy. It was clear early on in this process that member states did not want to embark in lengthy negotiations for a new substantive policy document, and as a result most of the negotiations revolved around whether to focus the next 10 years of drug control on UNGASS implementation, or on a reaffirmation of the 2009 Political Declaration, or a mix of both.
