An Cathaoirleach: Apologies have been received from Deputy Devine and Senator Nicole Ryan. I am pleased to open the 23rd public meeting of this committee and the seventh session of our legal issues module. I welcome Ms Julie Hannah, lecturer at the University of Essex law school and human rights centre and director of the international centre on human rights and drugs policy; Dr. Bisi Akintoye, solicitor and lecturer in criminology and criminal justice; Professor Julia Buxton, professor of justice studies at Liverpool John Moores University; Ms Marie Nougier, head of research and communication at the International Drug Policy Consortium; and Professor Alex Stevens of the centre for criminological research at the University of Sheffield law school...

I invite Ms Hannah to deliver her opening statement.

Ms Julie Hannah: I thank the Chair, members of the committee and distinguished colleagues for the invitation. I am sorry I cannot be with them in person.

I am a lecturer at the law school and human rights centre at the University of Essex and a director of the International Centre on Human Rights and Drug Policy, the only academic centre currently dedicated to research and teaching on the intersections of human rights law and international drug control law. I am a co-author of the international guidelines on human rights and drug policy, alongside my fellow co-sponsors, the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, the World Health Organization, WHO, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR. I am also a co-author of the recently launched guidance note on decriminalisation, alongside UNAIDS, UNDP, the International Network of People who Use Drugs, and Release. I have had the privilege and honour to engage with governments and communities around the world in building technical, policy and legal reform work towards rights-based drug policy. It is an honour to be here at what I see as a historic moment for Ireland as it explores democratic solutions to the harms of criminalisation, particularly for marginalised communities.

I would like briefly to reflect on the significance of the task before Ireland and to introduce two documents that will be especially useful to the committee's work, namely, the international guidelines on human rights and drug policy and the new guidance note on decriminalisation, and then to offer one brief reflection on my work in Brazil on why decriminalisation, important as it is, must be joined up with a broader vision of rights and social inclusion.

I want to emphasise that this is not simply a technical policy discussion. Drug policy can often be treated as an ordinary matter of policymaking - legislation, enforcement, sometimes health services and sometimes social programmes. To me, human rights are something different. They are not just another technical consideration. They are about real lives, supporting communities and protecting human dignity. They offer a deeper normative framework that should guide every policy choice that is made. That is why it matters to make human rights explicit in this process. It is a way of framing drug policy, directing us towards what matters and away from what does not. It moves us beyond narrow technical language so we can begin to ask different and better questions. Does our approach protect dignity? Does it reduce discrimination? Does it respect autonomy? Does it minimise or eliminate coercion? Does it establish accountability and transparency? Does it help to build the conditions in which people and communities can actually live safely and in dignity? It forces us to ask what we value in our responses to drug use. Do we prioritise health and human rights or do we allow outdated punitive models to persist? The answer to these questions will define the future of drug policy in Ireland.

Certain lines should never be crossed. These lines must be human rights standards, not arbitrary drug control standards. This is why the international guidelines on human rights and drug policy are important and useful to Ireland. They are important not because they create new rights, which they do not, but because they reflect and interpret the existing body of international human rights law in the specific context of drug policy. They help make visible what established human rights obligations mean in practice for law, policy, services and systems working with people who use drugs and people in situations of social exclusion.

The guidance note on decriminalisation is useful for a similar reason. It reflects decades of learning from decriminalisation processes, many of which the committee will learn about today from my distinguished colleagues, in different parts of the world and places that learning alongside current human rights standards and lived experiences of communities of people who use drugs. It is a practical tool. It helps explain what decriminalisation is, what it is not, and what foundational principles should guide such processes if reform is to be meaningful, effective and rights-based in practice. One of its key messages is that there is no one-size-fits-all model for decriminalisation. Different countries will take different paths, shaped by their own legal systems, histories and social realities. Even so, there are core principles that should guide these processes, such as the explicit recognition of rights, non-discrimination, no coercion, participation, accountability, the decriminalisation of all drugs and respecting the interdependence of rights. These are not abstract values; they are practical organising principles. That matters in Ireland, because what is at stake here is not only the harms associated with drug use but the harms associated with existing drug control policy. It is the documented human rights violations created by criminalisation itself: discrimination, social exclusion, coercion, surveillance and privacy breaches, and repeated, unnecessary contact with overly punitive systems. Those harms are not distributed evenly. They fall most heavily on those already pushed to the margins, especially people who are homeless.

If Ireland is serious about a public health approach and one that is based on human rights, which I think and hope it is, it is important to be clear about what that means. A rights-based response cannot simply mean attaching health language to a criminal law framework. If punitive control remains, then there is a real risk that punishment is simply relocated rather than removed and the human rights risks and consequences remain. A human rights approach also means that engagement with services must be voluntary...

[Click here to read the full debate on the Oireachtas website]