A group of prominent judges and prosecutors from Latin America and Europe issued a collective statement earlier this month decrying the consequences of current prohibitive drug policies and calling for new legal regimes that emphasize human rights to replace them across the globe.
The `Rome Declaration of 2011’, which endorses the findings of the Global Commission on Drug Policy’s report issued at the beginning of June, acknowledges that the current model of drug policy enforcement “distort[s] the function and role of the judiciary worldwide” by flooding the legal and penal systems with small drug use and possession cases that draw resources away from efforts against large-scale criminal organizations and corruption.
Diagnosing a “social and health emergency” as a result of existing drug policies and binding international conventions, the Rome Declaration lays out the failures of the current model of drugs enforcement by noting the relationship between existent legal regimes’ inability to effectively control use or supply, the increase in human rights depravations worldwide, and the continued expansion and successes of major drug traffickers.
The statement calls for legislative reform that helps to make punishments proportional to crimes and, where called for, the implementation of release from prison, alternative sentencing measures, conditional sentences, and a preference for the use of administrative, civil code, or family law to address drug use offences.
The Rome Declaration was signed by jurists and prosecutors from Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, and Italy who face the practical consequences of the global war on drugs on a day-to-day basis in their courtrooms. They issued the Declaration at the close of the international “Drug and Drug Addiction” conference in Rome organized by Magistratura Democratica and a coalition of Italian drug policy and legal organizations June 10-11 in Rome.
Signatories include: José Henrique Rodrigues Torres of the Appellate Court of the High Court of Justice in Sao Paolo, Brazil; Martín Vázquez Acuna of the appellate division of Criminal Court No. 1 of Buenos Aires, Argentina; Antonio Cluny, Senior Attorney General and Public Prosecutor of Portugal; and Piergiorgio Morosini, Judge of the Court of Palermo, Sicily, Italy.
Those behind the Rome Declaration join an expansive list of judges, legal professionals, law enforcement and security leaders, heads of state, doctors, economists, and human rights experts who are calling for fundamental changes to the failed national and international drug control policies established as part of the failed, decades-old global war on drugs.
