By Lloyd Williams, Senior Associate EditorTHE ANNUAL unilateral global drug certification programme, introduced by the United States Congress in 1986, has been repeatedly criticised for being arbitrary and one-sided, and an assessment which does not hold the United States to the same level of accountability to which it holds other countries.
Besides, it is regarded as subjective, accusatory, smacking of double standards and in effect, amounting to the United States, which is the world's largest consumer of illegal drugs, evading the same public examination it demands of others.
To counter this, it was suggested by other leading countries in the hemisphere, that the U.S. President should, instead, convene a conference of heads of government of major illicit drug-producing countries, major drug-transit countries and major money-laundering countries to present and review each country's drug reduction and prevention strategies.
GLOBAL DRUG PROBLEM
However, in 1998, heads of state and heads of government of the Americas came up with the idea of a Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM), as a tool to measure the progress of anti-drug efforts taken by the 34 members of the Organisation of American States, country by country, to combat the global drug problem and related crimes, and to provide the balance found lacking in the United States' certification programme.
Under the terms of the MEM, which is conducted under the direction of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commis-sion, a specialised agency of the Organisation of American States, known as CICAD, its Spanish acronym, each member-state appoints a drug-policy expert to help assess the nature of the drug threat in the other 33 countries. To ensure objectivity, national experts do not participate in the evaluation of their own countries.
OBJECTIVE
The MEM's objective is to strengthen mutual confidence, dialogue and hemispheric co-operation to deal with the drug problem with greater efficacy. It follows the progress of individual and collective efforts of all countries participating in the Multilateral Evaluation Mechan-ism, indicating both results achieved, obstacles faced by the countries, and recommendations on how to overcome them.
CICAD, representing the 34 countries of the OAS (since 1962, Cuba has been suspended from OAS activities but not membership), put the MEM into operation in 1999. It conducts full evaluations every two years with progress reports issued in the years between.
Assistant Police Commissioner Errol S. Strong, up to recently Senior Security Attaché at the Jamaican Embassy in Washington, D.C., and newly-appointed head of the Jamaica Constabulary's Narcotics Division, in an interview with The Gleaner a few days ago, explained how the MEM works. For the last five years ACP Strong has been Jamaica's principal member of the MEM's Governmental Experts' Group (GEG), with the alternate expert being Woodrow Smith, the senior director of security, intelligence and operations in the Ministry of National Security. The group is made up of experts from the 34 member-states and it uses the results of questionnaires and summary documents presented by each government to carry out evaluations. The experts include persons with policing experience, with civil and criminal law expertise, forensic analysts, accountants, medical doctors, psychiatrists and one or two with journalistic backgrounds. The experts visit the countries being evaluated; ACP Strong was in Argentina as a member of an MEM mission, a few weeks ago, and as a member of the GEG, has visited Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil.
FOUR AREAS
"The Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism that we are engaged in," says ACP Strong, "is really a platform for dialogue, not only among the experts who look at the problems in the various countries, but among the countries themselves... The GEG evaluates each country in terms of whether the country has met the standards that have been established according to the questionnaires."
A questionnaire goes out to each country and it covers four broad areas:
Institutional Building: dealing with national anti-drug plans and commissions; international conventions and treaties; and national information systems and data collection; whether the country has a national crime plan, whether it has a national drug authority that looks over the plan, whether there is a budget and how it is shared; the data collection capacity of the country having to do with drugs in all its aspects.
Demand Reduction: involving prevention, treatment and rehabilitation and trends in drug use.
Supply Reduction: relating to drug production and alternative development, pharmaceutical products and controlled chemical substances.
Control Measures: concerning illicit drug trafficking, corruption and the criminalisation of corruption, firearms and ammunition, money laundering and international co-operation and extradition; whether the country has a system to control pharmaceutical products and prevent them from being diverted, laws and regulations; also it has to do with seizures, arrests, convictions; special courts, whether there are alternative sentencing methods; and whether the countries are drifting in that direction. This area also looks seriously at firearms, ammunition and explosives and other related materials.
"And as you know," ACP Strong said, "the drug problem is really the liquid in which a lot of other things are floating... We have a whole range of questions in that area having to do with firearms and explosives and whether laws and legislation are up to speed... It's quite a large area that we look at some 80-odd indicators."
PARTICIPATORY
"It is really a participatory process," ACP Strong says. "It's really an attempt to move up what we call, and what we like to think, is a road in the jungle. It is pioneering work that started from nothing six years ago and somehow I think now we have managed to create a little road map that we can travel on."
"It's a peer evaluation but... I do not have anything to do with the outcome of the evaluation of Jamaica. The 33 others there are really 34 of us but one has not been very active so the 32 others look at the Jamaica report and they tear it to pieces. When they are discussing it, I am not even there. No expert is allowed to participate in the evaluation of his or her own country."
