 It's horrible. I know, man. I know, I know. Straighten out, we try, okay? We try, we try, okay? I know, I know. Look at them, they're crying. In Asia, drug users are often arrested on the basis of a positive urine test or an allegation by a neighbor. These people can be detained up to five years in compulsory rehabilitation centers without a trial, the possibility of appeal, or a medical evaluation. The number of the people in these camps is estimated at 400,000 in China, Vietnam, and Cambodia alone. People are systematically tortured, sexually abused, and starved in these centers. In some countries, they are forced to work without pay, often in the service of private companies that contract for forced labor with these centers. How people get into these camps? In a lot of cases, it's street sweeps, and in some cases, where police have specific quotas for picking up drug users, they wait outside methadone centers, for example, in China, and then they see people coming out of those centers and pick them up. What kind of human rights abuses happen in these camps? First of all, forced labor is a human rights abuse in and of itself. You may know that there's international law that says that you can make prisoners work, but these people aren't prisoners, they've never seen a lawyer or a judge. If you break the rules, and there are many, many rules, I have talked to people who have been recently released from centers, where as a result of smoking a cigarette, or drinking tea, or disobeying the quote teachers who are untrained guards, who are there telling them what to do, they are put into torture rooms, hung by one or both arms, made to kneel on glass or sharp objects, forced to squat in water in rooms too small to stand up in, and they don't want to lie down because they don't want to lie down in water, starved and beaten. In the working conditions, people often work until their hands are bloody. They are told that if they are pretending to be sick, they will be beaten, so they are dragged out of bed and beaten if they don't meet their quota. They are deprived of bathing privileges, deprived of food, told that if they can't make their quota, that's fine, they can just work all night. If you talk to people who use drugs in India who have been to these centers, you will get a lot of horror stories of people being chained for six, seven months. People being beaten up, tortured, sometimes. Being in jail would be better because then at least you would have access to the legal system. Whereas if you're in a compulsory treatment center, you have no access to the legal system. In China, we interviewed a former guard in one of the drug detention centers, and what we found, we asked him why the center was testing routinely everyone for HIV and not giving them their results. The guard frankly said, well, we test people to find out which of the women are HIV positive to know who we need to use a condom with, and then we have sex with them, and then we give them heroin to comfort them afterwards. We asked this guard also about physical abuse, about beatings of the drug users in these centers. He said, well, yeah, that happens, and we asked him how often it happens. And he said, well, about 10%. And we said, well, you know, how do you calculate 10%? And he said, well, anything higher than 10% would be a human rights problem. Sometimes people go into the camps voluntarily because their families are desperate, but even those people who enter voluntarily can't leave voluntarily. And if they try to leave before the expiration of their contract, sometimes the big brothers and big sisters who are the other more senior detainees or the guards beat them, break their legs, et cetera. There are detention camps where hundreds of people are kept in the name of drug control. Can you clarify the European Commission's position on that? We do not believe in coerced treatment of people with drug addiction. We have always placed human rights and fundamental rights at the top of our agenda on drugs. I believe that boot camps like this are an abomination. They don't work. The relapse rate is incredibly high, and there is no scientific basis for them whatsoever. Is the camp effective in deterring them using drugs in the future? Even by the country's own accounts, about as many as 95% of people return to drug use. What does science tell us about mandatory treatment in general? Is it effective? There is a lot of evidence saying that any residential treatment that is longer than three to six months is not effective. Keeping someone in an artificial environment for years doesn't increase the capacity for someone to re-engage with the society. Is there any correlation between being detained in the camp and the risk of transmission of HIV? Absolutely. There is a lot of evidence from Vietnam, from China, showing that there is an increased risk of HIV, because of course people still use drug in the camps. People tend to share needles more frequently in a camp than in the community. Can you explain to us how the UN institutions, especially UNICEF, were involved in the maintenance of these camps? When we first came out with our report on Cambodia, we documented abuses against children in these centers, and UNICEF, which was funding one of the centers, was very defensive, suggested that we had our facts wrong, that we had the sites wrong. And after a long period of advocacy, they've really acknowledged that these centers were abusive. It's not just UNICEF, it's also the U.S. government is funding activities in these centers. The Global Fund has in the past funded activities in these centers. You can't have voluntary HIV testing in a forced labor camp. You can't have peer-to-peer education in a forced labor camp. These centers need to be closed down and voluntary community-based drug dependency effective programs need to be put in place. Input and input do not approve of compulsory treatment centers. We do not want them. We would like to see voluntary treatment centers. I'd like to welcome the executive director, Mr. Antonio Maria Costa, this morning. There are thousands of people detained in the name of drug control. Is there any way how UNODC can engage in a dialogue with the Cambodia government to improve that situation? We are certainly looking into that. Not only as UNODC, we have a very small operation in Cambodia, but within the UN system. And I would like to make sure that the UN system at large, the country team in particular, is focused on this, not only on the law, but also on the closure of the detention centers, which are the heart of the problem. We must be prepared to speak out about human rights, abuses, wherever they occur. The crimes which are being committed today in the name of drug detention must be denounced. All compulsory drug detention centers should be closed and replaced by drug treatment facilities that work and that conform to ethical standards and human rights norms. Was the ethical dilemma for donors to improve the situation in the camps or close down the camps? You know, I think this is a very complicated question, which is if you know that terrible things are happening in a facility, but that people are suffering, what do you do? And, you know, this was, this is certainly as old as the concentration camp discussion. If people are starving to death in a concentration camp, do you go in and serve them food? What is the point at which you would say this, compromising with this system is what's called a rotten compromise. It's making a deal with something so fundamentally broken and abusive that you're actually doing more harm than good. And if you can't be willing to contemplate pulling out, then in fact, you shouldn't be engaged in these places in the first place because we're not talking about prisons which are unnecessary. They may be evil, difficult places, but they're necessary. We're talking about illegal, unnecessary, ineffective, cruel institutions. The closure of these centers is possible. Cole Kerr Center, pictured at the beginning of the film, was closed in 2008 due to immense pressure on the Cambodian government from human rights organizations. The UNICEF-funded Chom Chao Center was shut down in June 2010, and the children held there were returned to their families.