Making kin with more-than-human rights: Expert perspectives on human rights and drug policy

Abstract

Globally, calls for drug law reform are growing. Importantly, many argue that reforms should be guided by human rights. These calls, while welcome, assume a shared understanding of and approach to human rights, and that human rights can effectively guide less punitive approaches to drugs. Such assumptions fail to recognise important critiques, including that human rights have not always protected the interests of those who fail to fit normative ideals of the ‘human’. Are human rights the best framework to repair drug policy injustices? This paper explores these issues, drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with 30 human rights experts – about half of whom openly identify as people who use drugs – from around the world. We find a variety of approaches to human rights, with both optimism and pessimism about their utility for drug policy. These perspectives incorporate reflections on the different ‘levels’ at which rights operate, the limitations of rights and the need to think and do rights relationally, or in more-than-human ways (e.g. Braidotti 2019; Schippers, 2019; Grear 2018; Barad 2007, 2003). This emphasis on relationality stems from identified entanglements between drug policy, animals, habitats, the environment, and humans. Combining Donna Haraway's work on ‘companion species’ (2003), ‘making kin and making kind’ (2016), with Suzanne Fraser's (Early online) call to trouble drugs, we consider ways to trouble human rights by making kin through them. We argue that rights are a potentially generative space within which to explore relationality and new kinds of kin-making. We argue for a ‘more-than-human rights’ approach, following the work of legal scholars such as Marie-Catherine Petersmann (Early online, 2022, 2021) and Emily Jones (2021). We argue that this approach allows us to be and become ‘response-able’ (that is, able to respond, following Haraway) to the world in which we live and the challenges our world faces.