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In Latin America, trafficking cocaine so it can be sold to someone who wants to use it is more serious than raping a woman or deliberately killing your neighbor. While it may seem incredible, that is the conclusion of a rigorous study of the evolution of criminal legislation in the region, which shows that countries’ judicial systems mete out harsher penalties for trafficking even modest amounts of drugs than for acts as heinous as sexual assault or murder. How have we reached such an unjust and irrational point? In recent decades, especially the 1980s, Latin American countries, influenced by an international prohibitionist model, fell – ironically – into what we might metaphorically c...
This book allows readers to develop a critical understanding of the inter-American human rights system, as well as the dynamics of rights abuse and state response to violations in the Americas. The inter-American human rights system consists of two bodies, the Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The system has been and continues to be essential for the defense and protection of human rights in the Western hemisphere.
The drive to conduct this research was born out of the tension that developed on May of 2017 in the context of the journalistic coverage of the exhumations of those who died in the Bojayá massacre. Thus, this document has the purpose of asking and answering, from a socio-legal perspective, the following question: How can the events related to the armed conflict and to the transition to peace be narrated without violating the right to privacy of the victims? Or, how can a journalist record a dramatic event or recount an injuste that moves readers while respecting the limits of the private lives of the victims? To answer the question, this document examines the tensions between rights that can arise out of narrating the transition to peace as part of the journalistic profession, with the hope that the conclusion set forth is valid not only for the Bojayá case, but also in future transition years, as both victims and society in general benefit from a free and responsible press and the respect for private lives.
In this book, we offer an examination of and recommendations for women’s participation in Colombia’s peace processes, with an eye toward strengthening spaces for participation and, in doing so, ensuring that the peace accord is ultimately translated into long-term social pacts that are inclusive and committed to justice and equity.
The war on drugs has been a failure: even though more people have been incarcerated, accused of drug crimes, the consumption of substances hasn’t reduced, the narcotic traffic keeps growing and the violence associated to it has increased. The drug policy in Colombia has focused on criminalizing and imprisoning the lowest-ranking members of the drug trade, who are mainly poor people that occupy a marginal relationship with the business and with society. And there is a particular tendency for single mothers, who haven’t been able to find a formal job, to get involved in the illegal drug trade networks, developing high-risk tasks which are poorly remunerated. This document, on the one hand, makes a diagnosis about the situation of women linked with drug crimes in Colombia and the impact that has in their lives and families. On the other hand, It also offers public policy recommendations aimed at mitigating incarceration’s disproportionate effects on these women, with an eye toward preventing such effects in the future.
"The situation in Syria poses an acute-some might say existential-challenge to the international community's commitment to justice and accountability. It also marks the abject failure of the international system of peace and security erected in the post-World War II period. The Security Council has been almost entirely incapacitated by the propensity of Russia to wield its veto against nearly every coercive measure of any consequence, including legal accountability, that might be imposed on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. As a result, other actors, within and outside of the United Nations, have endeavored to find inventive ways around this geopolitical impasse. This forced cr...
This book is a collection of studies of drug policies in several Latin American countries. The chapters analyze the specific histories of drug policies in each country, as well as related phenomena and case studies throughout the region. It presents conceptual reflections on the origins of prohibition and the “War on Drugs,” including the topic of human rights and cognitive freedom. Further, the collection reflects on the pioneering role of some Latin American countries in changing paradigms of international drug policy. Each case study provides an analysis of where each state is now in terms of policy reform within the context of its history and current socio-political circumstances. Concurrently, local movements, initiatives, and backlash against the reformist debate within the hemisphere are examined. The recent changes regarding the regulation of marijuana in the United States and their possible impact on Latin America are also addressed. This work is an important, up-to-date and well-researched reference for all who are interested in drug policy from a Latin American perspective.
This report compiles the results of a research project aimed at describing the current palliative care situation in eight Latin American countries. The project’s general objective—to raise awareness and influence public policy around the need to approach palliative care from a human rights perspective—was achieved through rapprochement among professionals from various fields in the region, which in and of itself is a key step forward in terms of bringing together communities that defend patients’ rights with communities that advocate a drug policy embracing a public health focus. We hope that this diagnostic report is useful for professional associations, health professionals, patients’ rights advocates, drug policy reform activists, and decision makers, who can rely on its findings to better integrate palliative care into general health services and to use human rights language to promote public policy reform and guarantee the human rights of those in the Americas who suffer from severe and chronic pain.
This book presents an analysis tracing the operation of biopolitical mode of power in the global field of drug control. Through a series of theoretically framed investigations that relate current drug control policies to the broader frame of ‘vital politics,’ it attends to the relationship of drug control, democracy and authoritarianism and showcases these pressures on the case of the evolution of drug policy in the Czech Republic. Then, it turns attention to the relationship of power and knowledge, with a particular focus on ‘evidence-based’ policy that tends to more often sustain, rather than challenge coercive and punitive drug control policies. Last but not least, it looks at how the global drug control dispositif shapes those lives on one of Europe’s (internal) periphery, the Spanish Southern border. These investigations are intended to illuminate elements of the operation of the drug control dispositif and its far reaching (bio-)political effects in order to maintain and expand the space for thinking political alternatives.
This book addresses the multiple challenges of this new type of system. It seeks to show how, in the digital age, companies pursue the massive collection of personal data and how they deal with their power of information accumulation while also trying to push forward their business strategy. In the case of the Internet giants—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft (GAFAM)—they now possess an ability to reconfigure the behaviour of individuals, clients, and citizens globally. Specifically, this book analyzes the privacy policies of selected companies that use data-driven business models in four Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. It also assesses how prepared these states are to protect their citizens against the exploitation of their personal data and to face the legal and technical challenges of Big Data in an ever-changing transnational context, and with actors more powerful than nation states.