Monitoring and Evaluation

A country’s law and policies and their implementation and enforcement practices can support or hinder the effectiveness of efforts to ensure human rights-based drug control policy.

The Guidelines are an effective framework to monitor and evaluate the implementation of human rights-based drug policies.

• Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission used the Guidelines to monitor and evaluate residential treatment centres’ compliance with rights to protection against torture and ill-treatment, to health, to an adequate standard of living, to privacy and to be free from arbitrary detention.
• The Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe has created “Human Rights in Drug Policy: A Self-Assessment Tool” for countries to track progress on adopting human rights in drug policy. The tool uses the Guidelines, alongside Council of Europe human rights agreements, as the normative baseline for the tool. The tool is voluntary, non-comparative and designed to facilitate exploration of human rights issues in drug policy and to encourage inter-ministerial discussions.
• HRDP has created a tool "Alternatives to Detention: A human rights assessment tool". The tool provides users with a snapshot of the applicable Guidelines which direct States away from sentencing and detention in relation to criminal drug offences and considers alternative pathways to reduce the risk of incarceration or avoid the criminal legal system altogether.
• INPUD’s Legal Environmental scan: A Drug User-Led Monitoring Toolkit of Legal and Policy Framework uses the Guidelines as a reference point to evaluate human rights compliance and assist with advocacy relating to global HIV and AIDS commitments to people who use drugs.