The War on Drugs Is a War on Women: A Human Rights Reckoning -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

However, the unspoken truth of the war on drugs is this: it is failing badly at every step and maliciously selecting victims by race and social view as well as circumstances.

And most of those made victims are poor women.

The global regime of drug control pretends to be neutral. It is anything but that. Around the world, women from colour oF suffering inset  they are the fastest rising drug group in prisons. Mostly such women have served as mere couriers in drug and, they say, lesser roles. Some run small trading enterprises feeding local, friends.

Yet the system does not regard these women as victims of structural inequality. Instead, it treats them as criminals deserving punishment. That is not justice: it is simply stupidity.

The problem is not just harsh laws. At a deeper level, drug policy as currently enforced does not take women’s lives into abundant consideration. Many of them end up in the drug economy through paths marked by domestic violence, economic desperation, trafficking or being manipulated by male dominated networks. Their so  called “choices” are often constricted if not entirely coerced. Nevertheless, the courts almost never ask why these women are there. The law only asks what they did and punishes them accordingly.

It is here that the human rights failure becomes unmistakable.

International law is very clear about this. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights assures your dignity. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women places an obligation upon States to root out gender discrimination in all its forms. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights guarantees the right of everyone to health. But in practice drug policies undermine all three of these rights. They side step the violence that pushed women into vulnerability and merely criminalise women. They alienate drug users from necessary health care. And they shatter families by imprisoning mothers for non violent offences, leaving children to bear the brunt of state punishment.

The result is a system that punishes survival. We need to stop that now.;Even more troubling is how this system perpetuates cycles of harm. Incarceration does not resolve the conditions that lead women into d ug-related activities; it deepens them. Upon release, women forcible feel that they are under defecting prostitution offers less chances to obtain any income or social responsibility in the future. From there on out; so the state destabilizes their being once and then punishes one more time through exclusion.“That means if it were just ineffective policy, reform would be very urgent. But this is more than inefficiency. It is a human rights crisis.”In The Economist magazine, “One in ten countries has a majority of female prisoners. The international community can no longer afford to treat drug policy as a technical issue of enforcement. It is, at its core, a question of justice, equality and dignity. A system that disproportionately harms women cannot be defended in any credible human rights framework.

This solution is not by any means radical. Rather it is rational.

Such changes will reduce the number of young women behind bars. Rather than clog prisons up with drug offenders, we need to treat addictions as a medical problem.

When considering gender all legal systems should distinguish between coercion and all other forms of violence, from impassive inequality not simply regard them off hand details.

The central message is a new paradigm must come into being. In the context of drugs, women are not just offenders.They are also victims whose rights need protection.

It calls for political courage. It calls on States to dispense with the illusion of punishment as control. Its needs simply to light torch on the present system, which not protecting society at all–but perpetuate injustice.

The most uncomfortable truth remains: the war on drugs is not simply combating crime–it’s against those who have nothing to fight back with. 4 4 And when a system claims to be upholding the law while inflicting systematic harm upon those people that is long as intended to protect, it does not represent justice but failure.

A war that turns vulnerable women into sitting ducksisna. notwarondrugs. It’s an attack on humanrights.

A female robbed of her rights as human being by a drug convicting legal system is the antithesis of justice. It is the very opposite.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia