Detention for treatment
In many contexts, governments involuntarily detain certain populations in institutions, ostensibly for the purpose of treating a medical condition such as drug addiction, mental disability, or drug-resistant tuberculosis. Such institutions are invariably sites of extreme vulnerability to human rights abuse, sometimes amounting to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In all corners of the world, people who use drugs, or are perceived to use drugs, are forcibly detained in “rehabilitation” centers where they may be subjected to beatings, forced labor, medical experimentation, denial of basic health care (including evidence-based drug treatment), verbal abuse, and other severe human rights violations.
People with intellectual disabilities are likewise institutionalized in “social care homes” where they are denied their basic right to live in the community and often subjected to heinous abuse. For people with drug-resistant tuberculosis, mandatory detention in TB treatment facilities (which may be prison facilities) without due process, ability to appeal, infection control or access to the tests or drugs needed for diagnosis and treatment represents a severe human rights violation that undermines public health goals.
While involuntary inpatient residential treatment may be justified in rare cases, such as where a person with mental health problems is assessed to pose a risk of harm to themselves or others, detaining someone in any other case for the ostensible purpose of treating her/him is a human rights violation that can inflict severe pain and suffering. The human rights-based alternative in all cases is to provide the least restrictive treatment options in the community, and to deploy the skills of medical professionals to provide the necessary health care rather than act as guardians of people’s liberty.
News:
Blood cashews from Vietnam: forced-labour camps for Vietnamese drug users
Case study: Mohd (Malaysia)
Selected resources:
IFHHRO Position Statement on compulsory drug-related detention, IFHHRO, 2011
Fact Sheet Drug Detention Centers, Open Society Foundations, 2011
Report The Rehab Archipelago. Forced Labor and Other Abuses in Drug Detention Centers in Southern Vietnam, Human Rights Watch, 2011
Article From Vietnam's Forced-Labor Camps: 'Blood Cashews', Andrew Marshall, www.time.com, 2011
Position statement International Doctors for Healthy Drug Policies (IDHDP), 2011
Report Treated with Cruelty: Abuses in the Name of Rehabilitation, Open Society Foundations, 2011
Report Treatment or Torture? Applying International Human Rights Standards to Drug Detention Centers, Open Society Foundations, 2011
Report “Where Darkness Knows No Limits”. Incarceration, Ill-Treatment and Forced Labor as Drug Rehabilitation in China, Human Rights Watch, 2010
More than 1,600 Palestinian prisoners have agreed to end their hunger strike in exchange for concessions by Israel, including a modification to its practice of detention without charge or trial. 
As of June 1st 2012, the IFHHRO International Secretariat in Utrecht, the Netherlands, will be closed. The secretarial work of IFHHRO will continue with less capacity and with volunteers.
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