Since the early 1960s, international treaties have characterised certain drugs as illicit, prohibiting their use, possession and supply. Australia is also a signatory to these treaties. The rationale for the prohibition of certain substances is complex and has involved many factors. These factors included concerns about race, sex and sexuality, international trade, and power. Importantly, one key rationale for prohibition was that drugs are inherently harmful, in that they produced certain singular, stable, and predictable effects. These harms include drug overdose, blood-borne viruses such as hepatitis C, illness and injury including injection-related infections, and mental health effects. Other effects often said to emerge from drugs themselves include social problems such as poverty, homelessness, and unemployment.
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. Also in 2019, the World Health Organization, UNAIDS, United Nations Development Program, and the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy released a set of International Guidelines on Human Rights and Drug Policy. The International Guidelines were the result of a three-year consultative process, and ‘highlight the measures States should undertake or refrain from undertaking in order to comply with their human rights obligations, while taking into account their concurrent obligations under the international drug control conventions’. In Australia, recognition of the value of human rights for drug policy reform has also been growing. For instance, the Fifth National Hepatitis C Strategy emphasises the need for human rights-based approaches to the virus.
These developments raise key questions: Are human rights really the best, and most effective, framework for guiding reform? How are different ideas – about drugs and the human – relevant to human rights processes? Why have human rights frameworks worked (but to only some extent) in some countries like Canada, where human rights law has been leveraged in a series of landmark legal cases to secure rights including access to supervised injecting rooms and heroin assisted treatment? How do they work in Australia? And if human rights are not an ideal framework, what might an alternative framework look like? How might we explain the possibility that they work well in some settings and not in others?
Such questions have animated the efforts of GLaD researchers working with colleagues in the DruGS program and beyond, on the post-human rights project over the last four years. This Australian Research Council-funded project, led by Professor Kate Seear, with an advisory board of eight eminent human rights and drug policy scholars and practitioners, and project staff, has been investigating these questions through a number of different methods of data collection and analysis. This included interviews with parliamentarians responsible for undertaking human rights scrutiny as well as parliamentary advisors with expertise in human rights assessment and interpretation across four jurisdictions in Australia that require it, and interviews with global human rights and/or drug policy experts on the global human rights and drugs landscape. And, for the first time ever, the project mapped drug proposed laws and legal statutes in those four Australian jurisdictions with a parliamentary human rights scrutiny mechanism to see how these bills were scrutinised for their compatibility with human rights.
These have been rich and complex investigations, and they have yielded over twenty journal articles, over twenty conference papers, and over a dozen keynotes and invited talks thus far (as well as numerous posts and updates on this website). All the work has been focused on the goals of investigating how human rights have informed Australian drug policy in the past; identifying which ideas about drugs and ‘the human’ have shaped these approaches; assessing whether such ideas are problematic and outmoded; and mobilising these insights to build a framework for a post-prohibition world. Although the focus has been on the unique context of Australia, the project’s findings will have worldwide application and ramifications, particularly as other countries consider adopting a human rights-based approach to drug policy in line with the International Guidelines.
In February 2025, the GLaD team released their summary report from the project. It includes an overview of findings, as well as a list of recommendations for reforms to drug law, human rights law, and legislative scrutiny practices in Australia. These recommendations all aim to improve the nature and quality of human rights deliberations when it comes to both alcohol and other drugs; advance and protect the human rights of people who use alcohol and other drugs; and improve social, health and economic outcomes.
The team were excited to launch the report at an event that included reflections on human rights scrutiny processes and drug law reform, how to ensure that diversity and lived experience is engaged in debates on human rights and drug policy, and the utility of human rights in reforming drug policy.
The report is now available to download and read here.
Citation:
Seear, K. & Mulcahy, S. (2025). Human rights and drug policy: Summary report of project findings and recommendations. La Trobe University: Bundoora. https://doi.org/10.26181/28340675