abuse in the name of treatment: drug detention centres in asia this is horrible! i knowi know, we try we try, we try, we try! look at them! they are crying! in asia, drug users are often arrested on the basis of a positive urine test or an allegation by a neighbour. these people can be detained for up to 5 years in compulsory rehabilitation centres without a trial, the possibility of appeal, or a medical evaluation.
the number of people in these camps is estimated at 400 000 in china, vietnam and cambodia alone. people are systematically tortured, sexually abused and starved in these centres. in some countries, they are forced to work without pay, often in the service of private companies that contract for forced labour with these centres. how do people get into these camps? in a lot of cases, it is street-sweeps and in some cases, where police have a specific quota for picking up drug users, they wait outside methadone centres – for example, in china
– and they see people coming out of those centres and pick them up. what kind of human rights abuses happen in these camps? first of all, forced labour is a human rights abuse in and of itself. you may know that there is international law that says you can make prisoners work, but these people are not prisoners. they have never seen a lawyer or a judge. if you break the rules, and there are many, many rules, i have talked to people who have been recently released from centres, where as a result of smoking a cigarette, or drinking tea, or disobeying the “teachersâ€
–which are untrained guards who are telling them what to do – they are put into torture rooms, hung by one or both arms, made to kneel on glass or sharp objects, forced to squat in water in rooms too small to stand up in, and they do not want to lie down because they do not want to lie down in water, starved, and beaten. the working conditions, people often work until their hands are bloody. they are told that if they are pretending to be sick, they will be beaten. so they are dragged out of bed and beaten if they do not meet their quota. they are deprived of bathing privileges, deprived of food,
told that if they cannot make their quota, that is fine, they can just work all night. if you talk to people who use drugs in india, who have been to these centres, you will get a lot of horror stories of people being chained for 6-7 months, people being beaten up, tortured. sometimes, being in jail would be better because then at least you would have access to the legal system. whereas if you are in a compulsory treatment centre, you have no access to the legal system. in china, we interviewed a former guard in one of the drug detention centres. we asked him why the centre was testing routinely everyone for hiv
and not giving anyone their results. and the guard frankly said, “'well, we test people to find out which of the women is hiv positive to know who we need to used a condom with. and then we have sex with them and then we give them heroin to comfort them afterwards.'†we asked this guard also about physical abuse, about beatings of the drug users in these centres. and he said, “'well yeah, that happens'.â€
we asked him about how often this happens and he said “'well about 10%'.†we asked, “'how do you calculate 10%?'†he said, “'well, anything higher than 10% would be a human rights problem'.†sometimes people go into the camps voluntarily because their families are desperate. but even those people who enter voluntarily cannot leave voluntarily. and if they try to leave before the expiration of their contract, sometimes the ‘big brothers’ and‘big sisters’, who are the more senior detainees,
or the guards beat them, break their legs, etcetera. there are detention camps, where hundreds of people are kept in the name of drug control, can you clarify the european commission’s position on that? we do not believe in coerced treatment of people with drug addiction. we have always placed human rights and fundamental rights at the top of our agenda on drugs. i believe that boot camps like this are an abomination. they do not work. the relapse rate is incredibly high
and there is no scientific basis for them what so ever. is the camp effective in deterring them from using drugs in the future? even by the countries’ own accounts, about as many as 95% of people return to drug use. what does the science tell us about mandatory treatment in general? is it effective? there is a lot of evidence saying that any residential treatment that is longer than 3 to 6 months is not effective.
keeping someone in an artificial environment for years does not increase the capacity for someone to re-engage with the society. is there any correlation between being detained in a camp and the risk of hiv transmission? absolutely. there is a lot of evidence from vietnam, from china showing that there is an increased risk of hiv because, of course, people still use drugs in the camps. people tend to share needles more frequently in a camp than in the community. can you explain how the un institutions,
especially unicef, where involved in the maintenance of these camps? when we first came out with our report on cambodia, we documented abuses against children in these centres and unicef was funding one of the centres and was very defensive. [they] suggested that we had our facts wrong, that we had the sites wrong. after a long period of advocacy, they really've really acknowledged that these centres were abusive. and it is not just unicef, it is also the us government that is funding activities in these centres,
the global fund has in the past funded activities in these centres. you cannot have voluntary hiv testing in a forced labour camp. you cannot have peer-to-peer education in a forced labour camp. these centres need to be closed down and voluntary community-based drug dependency – effective –programs need to be put in place. indup and endup do not approve of compulsory treatment centres. we do not want them. we would like to see voluntary treatment centres.
i would like to welcome the executive director, antonio maria costa, this morning. thousands of people are detained in the name of drug control. is there any way that you and unodc can engage in a dialogue with the cambodian government to improve that situation? we are certainly looking into that, not only as unodc we have a very small operation in cambodia, but within the un system. i would like to make sure that the un system at large, the country team in particular, is focused on this;
not only on the goal but also on the closure of the detention centres which are at the heart of the problem. we must be prepared to speak out about human right abuses where ever they occur. the crimes which are being committed today in the name of drug detention must be denounced. all compulsory drug detention centres should be closed and replaced
by drug treatment facilities that work and that conform to ethical standards and human rights norms. what is the ethical dilemma for donors? is it to improve the situation in the camps or to close down the camps? you know, i think this is a very complicated question, which is if you know that terrible things are happening in a facility but that people are suffering, what do you do? this is certainly as old as the concentration camp discussion. if people are starving to death in a concentration camp,
do you go in and serve them food? what is the point at which you would say compromising with this system is what is called a rotten compromise. it is making a deal with something that is so fundamentally broken and abusive that you are actually doing more harm than good. and if you cannot be willing to contemplate pulling out, then in fact you should not be engaged in these places in the first place, because we are not talking about prisons – which are necessary.
they may be evil, difficult places, but they are necessary. we are talking about illegal, unnecessary, ineffective, cruel institutions. the closure of these centres is possible. kohl kor centre, pictured at the beginning of this film, was closed in 2008 due to immense pressure on the cambodian government from human rights organisations. the unicef funded chom chow centre was shut down in june 2010 and the children held there were returned to their families.
stop the abuse in the name of treatment! close the camps now! for more information read these human rights watch reports. subtitled by hunter holliman
