Joint Statement Against the Death Penalty at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs

The statement copied below - calling for an end to the illegal use of the death penalty for drug offences was read out by Eka Iakobishvili (Human Rights analyst for the International Harm Reduction Association) as an NGO representative (via the Vienna NGO committee on drugs) at yesterday's pleanry session of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs.

Such a call should be relatively uncontroversial at a UN gathering - the General Assembly has called for a moratorium on all use of the death penalty, and the UNODC has recently (it should be noted - following concerted NGO pressure) made a clear statement opposing the use of the death penalty. In a 2010 paper by the previous Executive Director of the UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa, titled 'Drug control, crime prevention and criminal justice: a human rights perspective - Note by the Executive Director' (para 25/26) the UNODC position was laid out (bold emphasis added):
"The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights specifies that in countries which have not abolished the death penalty, the sentence of death may be imposed only for the “most serious crimes”. The concept of “most serious crimes” is limited to those where it can be shown that there was an intention to kill which resulted in the loss of life. The weight of opinion indicates that drug offences (such as possession and trafficking) and those of a purely economic nature do not meet this threshold. Moreover, States that have abolished the death penalty are prohibited to extradite any person to another country where he or she might face capital punishment."
"Despite such prohibitions, a considerable number of the 47 retentionist States that continue to use capital punishment have carried out executions for drug offences in recent years. In some of these countries, drug offenders constitute a significant proportion of total executions As an entity of the United Nations system, UNODC advocates the abolition of the death penalty and calls upon Member States to follow international standards concerning prohibition of the death penalty for offences of a drug-related or purely economic nature.
However, as IHRA have demonstrated with their groundbreaking death penalty publications, the illegal use of the death penalty for drug offences remains widespread, with an estimated 1000