One participant who often works in justice settings such as prisons and police stations shared an example of putting his new-found human rights knowledge into practice. He visited a man in a police station, who had been arrested outside a pharmacy on a Friday morning. The man was prescribed methadone, but when the participant visited him on Sunday morning he still hadn’t seen a doctor and hadn’t been given his methadone. The participant felt this was wrong, so he revisited his notes from the Rights in Recovery Leadership Programme, then contacted the police and challenged the lack of medical care. As a result, a doctor visited the man the next day.
Participants on the Rights in Recovery Leadership Programme in Glasgow, February 2024
Independent Human Rights Fund for Scotland
This page contains links to the real life stories and evidence supporting an application to the Independent Human Rights Fund for Scotland submitted by the Scottish Recovery Consortium (SRC) and the British Institute of Human Rights (BIHR).
BIHR and SRC have been working together to bridge the gap between human rights policy and practice making rights real for people whose lives are affected by substance use since 2021. We have successfully delivered our Rights and Recovery Leadership Programme to two Scotland-wide cohorts, and we also recently published a joint resource on 'Using Human Rights in Recovery'.
Our partnership has been hugely successful due to the unique combination of SRC’s 15 years of lived experience knowledge and expertise and ability to connect recovery networks across Scotland with BIHR’s experience over 20 years supporting the implementation of human rights-based approaches.
Both of our organisations work every day to unlock the power of people and communities to hold power to account.
The impact of our 2024 Rights in Recovery Leadership Programme
Our human rights leadership programme supported a Scotland-wide cohort of recovery advocates to improve their knowledge of human rights law and their confidence to use it in their conversations with public bodies to push for rights-respecting decisions.
Click the image on the right to view the full infographic.
Stories of change
Click below to hear directly from the Rights in Recovery Leadership Programme participants
'Using Human Rights in Recovery' Joint Guide
To build on the success of the Rights in Recovery Leadership Programme in 2024, BIHR and SRC have co-produced a joint guide which focuses on how the Human Rights Act can be used as a powerful advocacy tool for people whose lives are affected by substance use. The guide is aimed at people who are accessing, or trying to access, recovery services in Scotland and across the UK, as well as their loved ones and supporters.
The guide sets out why our Human Rights Act matters in a recovery context and the legal duties it puts on public services. It covers some key rights which come up all too often for people in recovery, and features real-life stories gathered from people that SRC has worked with.
Why do human rights matter to people in recovery in Scotland?
Read our guest blog from SRC on why human rights matter to people in recovery
In Scotland, human rights are seen as central to improving the lives of people who are on their recovery journey.
The National Collaborative was created in 2022 as part of Scottish Government’s National Mission to reduce drug-related deaths. Its objective is to ‘to integrate human rights into drug and alcohol policy development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.’ The National Collaborative is now developing a Charter of Rights which will provide a framework for providers to meet the human rights of people affected by substance use.
Prior to this, the MAT standards had been introduced in 2021 to transform the way treatment is accessed and provided, making it easier and more attractive by allowing people to access treatment more quickly and to participate more in decisions around treatment planning. The right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence (Article 8) protects so many things that are important to us every day, and it comes up in recovery contexts regularly. The ideas behind this right are threaded through the MAT Standards, which aim to promote choice, prevent harm, and provide access to holistic support for housing, welfare and income needs, mental health care, and independent advocacy.
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