8 April 2003
Statement by the Executive Director
Mr. Antonio Maria Costa
Madam Chairman,
President Emafo,
Distinguished Delegates.
Welcome to the 46th session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND), and welcome to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
I wish to extend special thanks to you, Madam Chairman, to your Ambassador and to all delegates who took part in the preparations for this Commissions meeting, and especially of its Ministerial Segment. The preparatory work involved numerous debates and working groups. I know how exhaustive all this was.
We are meeting to take stock of the illicit drug situation since UNGASS in 1998. In order to facilitate the mid-term review, the Secretariat has produced several reports on the implementation of the Action Plans. A report on the Drug Programmes activities during 2002 was also submitted to your attention, with a detailed analysis of the work carried out by the Office on Drugs and Crime. I will summarize this report later on.
Before that, I would like to bring to your attention two additional short papers produced as a contribution of the Office to the mid-term review of UNGASS. They are titled:
I hope you appreciate the difficulties we faced in drafting the two papers. First, it was a quite complex task to encapsulate in a few simple words the essence of both matters. Second, I hope you have appreciated the effort to condense in a dozen pages, in common human speak (and therefore not in the usual UN language), matters that are complex and sensitive.
I will come back to these two papers at a later stage in my statement. Before then, I would like to invite you to look back over the recent past, during which new agendas have surfaced rendering drug control issues even more complex. These new developments are worth listing, as they have imparted the momentum to, and the reasons for, current efforts to recast UNODC operations.
Since May 2002 the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (I believe you have noticed that the Offices name has changed since you last met here in Vienna, 12 months ago) has worked hard to discharge its mandates in a proactive -- rather than a reactive -- manner. We developed the Offices new medium term Operational Priorities, benefiting heavily from the collaboration of Member States and NGOs.
At this point let me share with you some thoughts about the importance of the CND meeting you, Madam Chairperson, have convened.
This CND meeting is special. It is one of the most important in recent times for a number of reasons:
Given this context, what message do I propose we send to the outside?
I have identified four areas where sufficient evidence has been gathered to demonstrated the effectiveness of the Conventions:
All taken into account, I would say that drug control trends are heading in the right direction, although there is a lot of unfinished business. Put otherwise, countries are making encouraging progress to reach still distant goals. I hope you all share the substance, if not the wording of this naïve slogan. Let me start with the first half of this sentence, and summarize the evidence that progress has been encouraging.
These are the positive aspects of the review. There are other, less pleasing developments.
Analytically, I am forced to separate management questions from operational issues, although the two are intrinsically related.
This brief review of our recent work starts from recognizing the central role of the Operational Priorities, namely the Guidelines that the Office has established for the next few years.
You are, I hope, by now familiar with the process and final product of these Priorities, which were circulated last January. This is both an undertaking and a commitment:
The publication of the Operational Priorities has established the foundation for repositioning UNODC's work programme and organizational structure. Good progress has been made in (a) identifying the areas of synergy in our work against crime and drugs; (b) establishing a matrix structure for our operations, linking technical expertise with regional advisors, and (c) developing a clear nexus between country profiles, country strategies and programmes/projects.
We are also working hard at improving the Offices human resources, starting from the re-organization of the Office, the re-deployment of posts toward programme delivery, the re-profiling of Field Offices to ensure consistency of resources with delivery volumes; and launching of a rotation policy to ensure, inter alia, regular exchange of talent and knowledge between HQs and the field (we have nicknamed this the 4 Rs).
The Office's accountability is being enhanced in three areas:
The Office has worked hard in the recent past. Since 1998 UNGASS itself worked even harder, in capitals as well as in your Permanent Representations here in Vienna. UNGASS 1998 was a turning point for drug control policies. Especially important was its recognition that we do not know enough about illicit drugs trends, worldwide, and that best practices are not as widely spread as appropriate. To represent what I have in mind, let us separate the drug chain into its main components: cultivaltion (and production), trafficking, and abuse.
A major contribution of UNGASS was to tell governments that we do not know much about what is going on, and this shortcoming had to be amended. As Alice in Wonderland said in the early part of her journey: "if we want to know where we want to go, we need to know where to start from." I am glad that the voluminous documentation submitted to this meeting shows that we are improving the understanding of the reality of the remaining four fifth of mankind which had escaped earlier recording.
Since 1998, the Office on Drugs and Crime has tailored its programmes to meet these and other needs. Let me illustrate briefly the major lines of action upon which we have built programmes and projects, using the action plans part of UNGASS 1998 as the frame for my presentation.
a.Reducing demand for illicit drugs
Over the last four years, in line with UNGASS Declaration, Member States have attributed increased priority to demand reduction in the pursuit of a balanced approach (also an UNODC Operational Priority, and a Round Table at this CND). Through an increased allocation of resources, the Programme has assisted governments in:
One phenomenon is being felt far more widely than before: the impact of injecting drug use on HIV transmission, particularly in several regions. The fight against drug abuse is a fight against HIV, especially in the area from Eastern Europe to the Far East. In this regards I am very please to report on our strong and constructive collaboration with UNAIDS.
b. Elimination of illicit crop cultivation
We have seen over the years that alternative development is our most effective method to address illicit drug crop cultivation and production (Round Table). It has helped convert countries from major production to insignificant cultivation. With the right mix of incentives and assistance, farmers can be persuaded to move out of illicit drug crops and into licit livelihoods, even when the illicit crops provide a higher income. These successes, along with advances in interdiction methods, have forced organized drug criminals to find new locations and new populaces to exploit or just give up.
Our illicit crop-monitoring programme has produced over the last year a series of surveys, pointing out to encouraging results in reducing illicit crops in regions and countries such as the Andeans and Southeast Asia. In both these regions news has been quite positive: almost of an historical importance. If helped to sustain the current momentum, South East Asia could become a minor source of illicit opium by the year 2008. Such a tremendous achievement would close a 100-year chapter in the history of drug control. Regarding coca production, there is similar evidence that the two-year decline of cultivation in the Andean region, if sustained, could change the geography of supply and the trafficking routes of cocaine.
As stated earlier, news is not so good about Afghanistan, where the UNODC Drug Control Programme has confirmed that considerable opium poppy cultivation took place in 2002. Recent (Spring 2003) pre-surveys have confirmed yet more alarming trends. In mid-2002, we reopened our office in Kabul, launching a broad range of projects to strengthening the Counter-Narcotics Department of the National Security Council, to assist in the law enforcement and criminal justice sectors, to support the coordination of drug control efforts with neighbouring states, and to engage the agencies involved in post-conflict reconstruction to ensure that the elimination of illicit drug crops remains a priority. Our Afghan programme has also increasingly assisted neighbouring states to deal with the effects of illicit drug traffic and abuse along the transit routes. Our offices in Islamabad, Tashkent and Tehran have developed a broad range of programmes that include legal assistance, anti-money laundering, demand reduction, border controls, national drug control planning and law enforcement cooperation.
c. Control of Precursors
The threat of an epidemic of amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) has emerged as a key priority of many governments. Because success is not achievable through the methods that are effective with organic crops cultivated by small farmers, ATS presents a difficult but not insurmountable challenge. We have provided scientific support to governments in order to trace the origin of synthetic drugs, and thus attack the producers in their home bases. We are also working to develop a global information-clearing house on the ATS problem. The INCB, following upon its successes with heroin and cocaine precursors, has worked with Member States to launch Project Prism against the main chemical precursors used for the manufacture of ATS. Especially important, the first Global Survey of ATS production, trafficking and abuse, expected this spring.
d. Money laundering and judicial cooperation
Terrorists and organized criminal groups launder money, using the same techniques as white-collar cheats such as tax evaders, corrupt officials and corporate (small shareholders) raiders. Many states need assistance in order to establish the legislative framework and investigative tools such as the establishment of financial intelligence units to counteract the flow of drugs by counteracting the flow of money. The Office is responding to these challenges through its programme against money laundering, providing legislative support, legal databases, training, and assistance to legal and law enforcement practitioners in the form of mentors.
Similarly, the legal advisory programme is helping countries:
Madam Chairman, I cannot complete my statement without making reference to resources.
As noted in the Operational Priorities, the re-engineering of the Office and its credibility requires a set of enabling conditions. Among these conditions, is the need for sound, predictable and stable financing.
I am gratified by the commitment of governments to assist us, as evidenced by the work carried out by the CND Working Group on predictable funding. I am also grateful to those countries, whether donors in the traditional sense or new ones, who have agreed to co-financing /cost-sharing arrangements. Last week, thanks to your response to my plea, I was able to inform my staff of the return to one-year contract extensions. 12 months is not adequate as yet, but finally staff can again get rental leases and car mortgages, which are usually not extended to those with unstable job conditions.
This is clearly an improvement. At the same time, I feel bound to share with you the concerns I have, namely:
Growing constraints on supplementary funding, compared to the already small base of approved funding, presents potential risks of distorting approved programmatic priorities (including those set by CND), as well as possible financial and staffing management problems due to the unpredictability of the voluntary resources. On our part, we are exploring new funding mechanisms to leverage our resources, in particular with non-profit foundations and the corporate sector. We are also seeking to involve assisted countries to a greater extent than in the past. But, we need your help and support to ensure that by the time our budget proposal is examined, a sufficient balance of general-purpose resources will be available to cover the requirements of our infrastructure here and in the field.
Madam Chairman,
The Commission has an enormous task before it. Public opinion expects from their governments a clear message, bringing consistency between national and international interest. The discussions about illicit drugs always touch emotions, individual lives, families and communities in every corner of this world. All of us, at the United Nations, should use the occasion of this mid-term review to renew our determination to spend public money more effectively, and deliver better quality public goods.
The mission of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime will not be possible without your commitment and without the involvement of all partners of civil society. Most people are indeed as concerned as we are about drug abuse, trafficking in drugs, human beings or weapons, corruption and crime: let us help them help us. We count on your collective support to provide us with policy guidance, good practices and resources.
I thank you all for your attention.