Criticism
In 2007 the five biggest donors to UNODC's budget were, in descending order: European Union, Canada, United States, UN and Sweden. The United States have repeatedly threatened to withdraw funding unless Costa assured that the UNODC would abstain from any expression of support for harm reduction measures in general. According to the Transnational Institute this explains the fact that - unlike other United Nations bodies like WHO and UNAIDS - UNODC does not promote harm reduction policies (e.g. needle exchange and Heroin-assisted treatment).
Costa has also been criticized for having reports published that seem to be designed to please donor countries and to support their prohibitionist policies, such as the 2006 UNODC report Sweden's Successful Drug Policy: A Review of the Evidence.(Sweden's financed in 2005-2006 about 4% of UNODC's budget)
His latest controversial statement has been to state that only drug money saved the world financial system from a complete collapse, effectively identifying major banks as money-launderers for about $325 billion in proceeds.
Read more about this topic: Antonio Maria Costa
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)