Can the Law and Human Rights make a difference in HIV?

If you’re living with HIV or working in the field, you probably hear lots of talk about human rights.  You’ve probably heard that you have a right to access testing and treatment, support and education, and not to be discriminated against because of your HIV status (or gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, etc …).  But that doesn’t mean that we actually have access to all of these things … even here in Canada where we do have access to testing, treatment and support, we are by no means free from discrimination.  This can leave you with a feeling that human rights laws are just a bunch of lip-service and don’t actually mean anything.  Unfortunately, I think there is some truth to this … BUT I have recently learned some very useful information about how international Human Rights laws work and the role they CAN play in our response to HIV.

Just before the holidays, I completed an e-learning course through the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) called Using the Law and Legal Policy in an Effective Response to HIV and AIDS.  It was a truly international course, with participants in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Ukraine, and many other places.  It turns out that every country in the world has signed on to at least one declaration regarding the human rights of people living with HIV, which in theory binds them to take the actions and guarantee the rights outlined in that declaration.  Since many of the declarations include steps like “eradicating child poverty” and “eliminating gender inequality”, it’s safe to say most governments are not exactly meeting expectations!  That being said, the fact that a government has signed a declaration means that a group of activists can take steps to hold that government accountable in a case where rights are being denied.  And sometimes, as was the case in El Salvador in 2000, the pressure of an international petition, in combination with more traditional activism and public awareness raising, can lead to change.*

We also spent a good deal of the course looking at how national laws and legal policies that are not directly HIV-related create an environment that is either helpful or harmful to people living with and at-risk for HIV.  Canadian examples include laws prohibiting harm reduction for injecting drug users and sex workers.  In many places, laws about marriage and inheritance make women more vulnerable to neglect and mistreatment, as do anti-sodomy laws which force common high-risk sex underground and inhibit harm reduction education.  The way that different levels of “the legal system” (police, for example) deal with people living with and at-risk for HIV also affects the overall human rights climate.  While changing the law can be incredibly challenging (and efforts sometimes back-fire**), the first steps we can take to improve the legal environment for people living with HIV are educational ones:

1) The first piece is about empowerment and awareness for people living with HIV and at-risk for HIV.  The majority of people do not know what rights they have, let alone how to go about fighting for them.  The education and empowerment process is ongoing and won’t result in change overnight, but sometimes it takes just one high-profile case to turn things around.

2) The second piece, which probably has to happen along with the first, is to educate all the levels of the legal system about human rights issues as they affect people living with and at-risk for HIV.  The police, judges, and lawyers who might be representing people living with HIV, all need to be educated on the rights that are in place.  The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network is doing some very important work in this area.

These are things that we are probably doing already, but can do MORE.  It was encouraging for me to learn, in this course, that pursuing an issue through legal channels is not “an alternative” to the activism and public awareness initiatives that we are used to, but can supplement them, making them more powerful and possibly, more effective.

- Miriam

*The petitioners appealed to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, claiming that the state of El Salvador was denying a group of HIV+ people their “right to life, health and well being”—as guaranteed by the American Convention on Human Rights—by failing to make antiretroviral therapy available.  Faced with the legal challenge and accompanying publicity campaign, the government decided to make treatment available to these individuals and not long after put a plan in place to make HIV treatment available to all people living with HIV in the country.

** Because changing a law involves taking a case to a Supreme Court and/or appealing to government representatives to create legislation, the outcome is unpredictable.  Sometimes the resulting legislation or Supreme Court precedent is not the same as what the activists put forward, and sometimes it can make the situation even worse.

This was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2011 at 10:00 am and is filed under Education & Resources, HIV Prevention, HIV stigma, HIV Treatment, Homophobia . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.

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