|
<<previous | index | next>> Why is protecting human rights necessary to combating HIV/AIDS?Twenty-five years into the pandemic, human rights abuses continue to render individuals vulnerable to HIV infection and bereft of care and treatment once infected. Increasingly governments have acknowledged the link between human rights and HIV/AIDS. Vague and incomplete references to rights and freedoms undermine this acknowledgment. Government inaction exacerbates the problem. Protection from HIV infection and access to care and treatment for those infected requires commitment, and meaningful targets to translate that commitment into action. The global community must put into practical action the claim that human rights relate to HIV by identifying specific goals for the protection of human rights. The link between HIV and human rights has been extensively documented. When Ukrainian police harass, intimidate and abuse injecting drug users trying to access clean needles and HIV prevention information, violations of the rights to seek information, assemble and due process contribute to the virus’s spread.5 When discrimination in Jamaica’s hospitals and clinics bars HIV patients from available life-saving treatment, death and the spread of HIV become realities while the right to health remains a dream.6 When U.S. and Ugandan-funded evangelical groups tell young people that condoms have multiple holes through which HIV passes, denial of the right to information undermines the fight against HIV.7 The failure to protect women from discrimination, sexual abuse and gender-based violence has led to a “feminization” of the AIDS epidemic in many parts of the world.8 Denying due process and police protection to sex workers9, transgender individuals10, and migrants11, and denying prisoners12 the information and means to control HIV’s spread further escalates the epidemic. Turning the tables on HIV -- one of the Millennium Development Goals13 -- requires preventing and redressing human rights abuses that fuel the pandemic. [5] Human Rights Watch. Rhetoric and Risk: Human Rights Abuses Impeding Ukraine’s Fight Against HIV/AIDS. Mar. 2006. Vol. 18, No.2(D). Pg. 3. http://hrw.org/reports/2006/ukraine0306/. [6] Human Rights Watch. Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence and Jamaica’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic. Nov. 2004. Vol. 16, No. 6(B). Pg. 3. http://hrw.org/reports/2004/jamaica1104/. [7] Human Rights Watch. The Less They Know, The Better: Abstinence-Only HIV/AIDS Programs in Uganda. http://hrw.org/reports/2005/uganda0305/index.htm; Human Rights Watch. Ignorance Only: HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Programs in the U.S. http://hrw.org/reports/2002/usa0902/USA0902.htm#P74_1500. [8] Human Rights Watch. A Dose of Reality: Women’s Rights in the Fight Against HIV/AIDS. http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/21/africa/0357.htm [9] Human Rights Watch. Ravaging the Vulnerable: Abuses Against Persons at High Risk of HIV Infection in Bangladesh. Vol. 15, No. 6(C). August 2003. Pgs. 21-35. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/bangladesh0803/bangladesh0803.pdf; Human Rights Watch, Ukraine Report, supra note 6. [10] Human Rights Watch. Nepal: “Sexual Cleansing” Drive Continues. March 18, 2006. http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/03/17/nepal13020.htm. [11] International Labour Organization. HIV/AIDS and Work in a Globalizing World. 2005. Pgs. 55-61. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/trav/aids/publ/globalizing.pdf. [12] Glenn Betteridge. Prisoners’ health and human rights in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS Policy & Law Review. Vol. 9, No. 3. December 2004. Pgs. 96-99. [13] U.N. Millennium Development Goals. Goal #6. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.
|