Human Rights

Singapore's law minister justifies the mandatory death penalty for drug offenders. Unlike the rest of us losers, Singapore hasn't lost the war on drugs, he said.

Things that make you go hmmm... In one incident in Mexico this week, gunmen attacked a convoy carrying two prisoners. In the aftermath, the two prisoners were turned over to the Mexican Marines. Next thing you know, one of them turns up dead on the side of a road and the other has gone missing. Hmmm.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon caught serious flak this week from two different directions: Angry residents of Ciudad Juárez, tired of the killing and the soldiers, and the Mexican Catholic Church, which issued a report critical of human rights abuses in the military and crooked law enforcement.

In 1913, the El Paso city council became the first in the country to outlaw marijuana. Now, faced with the horrendous prohibition-related violence across the river in Ciudad Juarez, it has passed a resolution condemning current drug policies, but only after dropping language calling for marijuana regulation. It's got three years left until the century mark to get it completely right.

Cambodia's "drug treatment" centers are the scene of torture, rape, and abuse, said Human Rights Watch in a scathing report Monday calling for them to be shut down. Oh, and they don't do much drug treatment, either.

The Mexican government scored a victory this week with the killing of Beltran Leyva cartel head Arturo Beltran Leyva, but will it turn out to be a pyrrhic victory? Knocking off cartel heads in the past has typically led to renewed infighting as rivals vie to replace them.

Amnesty International accuses the Mexican military of human rights violations in the drug war -- a problem for US funding. Meanwhile, this year's south of the border prohibition-related death toll passed 7,000 this week.

Chakib El Khayari runs a human rights group in Morocco's Rif Mountains, where marijuana cultivation is a way of life. He has run afoul of the Moroccan government for criticizing its policies toward the poor pot farmers, and an appeals court has just ruled he should stay in a jail. Human rights and drug reform groups consider him a prisoner of conscience.

The Drug Policy Alliance's 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference took place in Albuquerque last weekend. It was quite a show. Here's a scene report.

At a conference last week, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda bluntly accused the Mexican military of murdering members of the so-called drug cartels to avenge its own losses in the country's bloody wave of prohibition-related violence.