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Disability and HIV Leadership Forum, July 21, 2012

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:40:00 -0400

AIDS-Free World is pleased to announce the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum, a full-day advocacy training on July 21, 2012, immediately preceding “AIDS 2012,” the XIXth International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC. Presented in collaboration with Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI) and Gallaudet University, the Forum will bring together young activists and leaders under 30 from the around the world to learn from seasoned advocates in the fields of HIV, disability rights, and human rights. Disabled youth with experience in the field of HIV as well as those recently introduced to AIDS activism were selected for their leadership skills. The one-day training will help them to advance disability rights at home, stay connected with young advocates from other countries, and help to bridge the disability rights and AIDS movements.

The Forum will take place on the Washington, DC, campus of Gallaudet University, known as the world's premier higher education institution serving deaf and hard-of-hearing people. The leadership trainees — young people with a range of disabilities and innumerable abilities — will learn practical “how-to’s” of advocacy from some of the world’s leading voices in the disability and HIV movements. Following the Forum, participants will have a chance to apply their new advocacy, communication, and networking skills as delegates to AIDS 2012.

Each young leader’s participation at the Forum and AIDS 2012 has been underwritten by one of over 20 sponsors.* A Working Group of disability and AIDS experts is guiding the Forum agenda, which will draw on prominent advocates attending AIDS 2012 to encourage, inspire, and share their own experiences with the next generation of leaders.

For additional information or to become a sponsoring organization, please contact:
Maja Hipkin: TEL: +1 (905) 393‐5483; mlh@aidsfreeworld.org

* Sponsors as of 29 March: African Union of the Blind, African Women’s Development Fund, Christian Blind Mission, CORDAID, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Global Fund for Women, Human Rights Watch, Leonard Cheshire Disability, Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation, Open Society Institute, Stephen Lewis Foundation, UNAIDS, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UN Women, VSO International, World Health Organization, World Vision Canada, and sponsors who prefer to remain anonymous.

AIDS-Free World advocates for more urgent and effective global responses to HIV and AIDS. Since our founding in 2007, we have worked toward greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the worldwide AIDS movement. The Disability and HIV Leadership Forum is the next critical step in building a youth movement and ensuring that people with disabilities can become fully involved and instrumental in the global response to AIDS. To read more about the Forum, and about our work at past International AIDS Conferences, please visit www.aidsfreeworld.org/Our-Issues/Disability/Q-A-Disability-and-HIV-Leadership-Forum.aspx.

Q&A: Disability and HIV Leadership Forum

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:24:00 -0400

On July 21, 2012, AIDS-Free World, in collaboration with Disabled Peoples' International and Gallaudet University, is pleased to present the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum, a full-day advocacy training immediately preceding “AIDS 2012,” the XIXth International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC. The Forum will bring together young activists and leaders under 30 from around the world to learn from seasoned advocates in the fields of HIV, disability rights, and human rights. More information on the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum can be found here.

Introduction and Vision
Veteran disability rights activists share a deep concern: when they look over their shoulders to the next generation, they don’t see the droves of young people they had hoped would be ready by now to assume leadership of the disability rights movement as the current leadership ages. They don’t see many young activists at all who are fully equipped to lead the struggle for inclusion of people with disabilities in the global AIDS movement. What they do see are young activists who have boundless potential, but who’ve been given few opportunities to develop the advocacy skills that can transform raw energy, ideas and passion into successful strategies for social change. They see both a serious need and an excellent opportunity to help the next generation ready themselves to lead the global disability rights movement.

A Disability and HIV Leadership Forum of young people with disabilities from around the world will meet that need. It will, for the first time ever, connect the current and future leaders of the disability and the AIDS movements. It will use the time immediately preceding the upcoming International AIDS Conference to prepare young people with disabilities to take part in AIDS 2012 — and not as passive observers, but as a formidable presence, ready to test new advocacy skills and begin building their generation’s disability rights movement.

AIDS-Free World is an international organization that advocates, often at the highest levels, for more urgent and effective global responses to the AIDS pandemic. Organizing a pre-AIDS 2012 Disability and HIV Leadership Forum is a challenge that we feel especially qualified and eager to take up. Since our start in 2007, we have worked toward the greater inclusion of people with disabilities in the worldwide AIDS movement — and we have always devoted special attention to the biannual International AIDS Conference. In conjunction with Disabled Peoples’ International (DPI), we gathered leaders of the disability rights movement from several continents and put on the first-ever “town hall” on disabilities at the 2008 conference in Mexico City; at the next conference, in 2010 in Vienna, we reconvened to see how much had changed in the interim with a panel we called “Two Years Later.”

In anticipation of the 2012 conference, AIDS-Free World outlined what we saw as an inspired vision for an official “pre-conference forum” — an idea that was first proposed to us by our colleague, international disability rights activist Steve Estey, who has worked with us on the last two International AIDS Conferences. The vision of a forum that will give young people the tools to break down barriers to inclusion in the fight against AIDS, and the skills to lead and sustain the disability rights movement, is very clear. The remaining barrier is among the highest. Breakthroughs are always expensive, and so the challenge for us is to find organizations that recognize the value of investing in the young people who, if supported, will lead us into the future.

The global AIDS movement has yet to join the rest of the world in fully recognizing the human rights of people with disabilities. The XIXth International AIDS Conference in July 2012 will bring tens of thousands of AIDS advocates, researchers, medical professionals, government officials, activists, corporations, policy-makers and political leaders to Washington, DC. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, AIDS-Free World is developing a Disability and HIV Leadership Forum that will take place immediately prior to the AIDS conference. The Disability and HIV Leadership Forum will bring together young activists from around the world to discuss the intersections of disability, human rights and HIV, to develop advocacy skills for advancing their disability rights work, and to connect with other advocates.

Q&A
What will the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum achieve?
The Forum will support the training of young people as the movement’s future leaders, and it will ensure that, in place of tokenism, the meaningful presence and involvement of people with disabilities in the world’s foremost AIDS conference signals that the “human rights approach” of the global AIDS movement truly applies to all.

The Forum will remove some of the barriers that stand between the next generation and their full leadership capacities. It will expose them to the seasoned pros, who have invaluable advocacy lessons and skills to impart, and give them the modern skills needed to build and maintain networks in a globalized world. Young disability rights advocates who’ve been active in their own cities or countries will be given the opportunity to attend AIDS 2012, to connect with one another and to learn how to bring new people into their movement. They’ll hear from experienced global advocates about the skills and tactics that can cause closed doors to open, enlist experts, grab the attention of authority figures, persuade decision-makers, interest journalists, keep elected officials on their toes, and help stave off despair at those inevitable points when it will all seem fruitless.

What concrete skills will be taught at the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum?
Participants will have an opportunity to discuss issues related to disability and HIV with one another, and they will have an exceptional chance to hear from a range of global leaders, addressing issues such as HIV, disability rights, LGBT rights, women’s rights and international human rights. Participants will also learn and develop concrete advocacy skills that will help them to advance their work for disability rights. Sessions may include topics such as:
• Media and communications: how to draft a press release, host a press conference and write an Op-Ed
• Public speaking
• Becoming effective activists: how to make demands that will be heard by the topmost decision-makers
• Technology: how to use social networking and media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and The Hub to build a global movement, stay connected and conduct advocacy campaigns
• Accessing and utilizing the United Nations system: how to work with the United Nations at a country, regional and international level, and how to advance disability rights within the UN Secretariat, UNAIDS, UN Women and other UN Agencies
• Funding and disability rights: how to influence multilateral funding structures such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and ensure that people with disabilities are included in funding allocations
• Utilizing regional and international human rights systems
• Lobbying governments to ratify the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities
• Lobbying governments to improve legal rights and protections for people with disabilities, including laws that protect disabled workers, or provide equal access to education, health facilities and public buildings
• Lobbying governments to abolish discriminatory laws against people with disabilities and ensure that anti-discrimination laws include people with disabilities
• Recruiting, enlisting and engaging pro bono lawyers so they become disability rights advocates and work to improve national laws on disability and HIV
• Advocating for disability rights amongst HIV/AIDS service organizations: how to ensure HIV organizations are complying with human rights standards and providing access to HIV prevention, treatment and care for people with disabilities
• Partnering with women’s rights organizations to examine issues affecting women with disabilities
• Partnering with LGBT organizations and groups of people living with HIV to examine issues affecting people with disabilities in these communities

Who will participate in the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum?
Approximately 30 global activists under the age of 30 who demonstrate leadership potential will be selected to attend the conference from all over the world. The group will include a combination of disability rights activists who have not yet become engaged in AIDS work, as well as people with disabilities who are AIDS experts.

Who will present at the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum?
The conference will draw upon the expertise of leaders in fields such as disability rights, the AIDS movement, international human rights law, women’s rights, global health, communications and technology. AIDS-Free World will invite speakers and trainers from amongst the thousands of HIV activists already traveling to Washington for the International AIDS Conference, as well as prominent disability rights activists and academics from around the world.

When will it take place?
The Disability and HIV Leadership Forum will be held on the day immediately prior to the start of the International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, and participants will then go on to attend the AIDS conference. The event will bring together a group of activists who might not otherwise attend an international AIDS conference – because of the prohibitive expense, or because they were not informed about or included in the AIDS conference, or because they did not feel that their issues would be addressed, or because of concerns about accessibility at the AIDS conference venues.

How will the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum link and contribute to the 2012 International AIDS Conference?
An initial goal of the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum is to increase the active engagement of people with disabilities in the 2012 International AIDS Conference. The 30 young activists will participate in the AIDS conference – as official delegates, as informed advocates, as youth leaders, as savvy organizers, as volunteers, as key panelists – where their presence, enhanced by their newly acquired advocacy and networking skills will help to end the silence from the global AIDS community on disability issues.

In addition, the International AIDS Society will be asked to consider registering the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum as an AIDS 2012 official pre-conference – a distinction so far conferred on just two pre-conference gatherings. This recognition will help garner publicity and awareness about the Disability and HIV Leadership Forum amongst delegates, speakers and media attending the AIDS 2012 Conference.

Finally, in the months leading up to the AIDS conference, AIDS-Free World will continue to discuss, with the conference planners, ways to more fully incorporate disability issues into the conference agenda. This includes adding sessions on disability and HIV and ensuring that people with disabilities are included as speakers in sessions on a whole range of other topics. It will also include accessibility issues – ensuring that this conference is designed in such a way that everyone can participate, and that conference organizers include, for example, CART technology, Braille materials, sign language interpretation, wheelchair access, and registration fee waivers for personal assistants. Our advocacy on these issues during the past two International AIDS Conferences in Mexico City and Vienna has resulted in some improvements, but the International AIDS Society agrees that much remains to be done. The 2012 International AIDS Conference – to be held in the United States, a country recognized globally for its leadership on disability issues – represents an opportunity of historic proportion.

Where will it be held?
The Leadership Forum will take place in Washington, DC. Gallaudet University, a leading university for Deaf and hard of hearing students with a global reputation for its role in the disability rights movement, has agreed to host the one-day event on their campus.

Is this a good investment?
As with most initial contributions to “movement-building,” the benefits of this investment will grow both rapidly and exponentially. The Disability and HIV Leadership Forum will equip young global leaders with advocacy tools to strengthen and expand their disability rights work. Before even returning home, the leaders will immediately apply their skills and seek to impact and influence the global AIDS community assembled for the conference. And finally, the participants will return to their countries, spanning across the globe, where they will share their skills with their home organizations and networks. By AIDS 2014, the world should see the emergence of a strong, vocal, active and effective movement to address disability and HIV.

Coca-Cola: A Waiting Game

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:59:00 -0400

On April 25, 2011, at a music festival in Montego Bay, a Jamaican Dancehall performer who calls himself Sizzla sang “Boom Bye-Bye,” a homophobic anthem that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians. Online clips show a large and enthusiastic crowd cheering Sizzla as he stomped and shouted his hateful lyrics angrily in front of a stage-sized Coca-Cola banner, the company that paid for his performance.

One week later, AIDS-Free World Legal Advisor Maurice Tomlinson wrote to Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent, calling on him to denounce Sizzla’s sentiments; condemn all forms of homophobia; and stop sponsoring murder music. Kent never replied. In his place, Coca-Cola Chief Diversity Officer Steve Bucherati supplied a short list of Coke’s equal rights credentials.

Following weeks of inaction, Tomlinson then called on Coca-Cola to purchase a full-page ad in Jamaica’s four major newspapers denouncing Sizzla; to implement a clause in all future contracts guaranteeing an end to Coke’s endorsement of homophobic musicians; and to sponsor a tolerance-themed concert in Jamaica.

Not until June 21, in a phone call with Tomlinson, did Mr. Bucherati acknowledge that Coke had made an error. Bucherati admitted that there was a lack of pre-event due diligence, and that in fact, the company’s performer contracts do not contain clauses prohibiting homophobic language and actions. He said the company had written a short apology as a letter to the editor of The Western Mirror, but it was never published; in spite of that, Coke hadn’t paid to place the letter. While not responding to Tomlinson’s demands, he did report that Coca-Cola was undergoing a review of its global music sponsorship policy, and that upon its completion, the company would publish an article in the Jamaican press apologizing for the Sizzla incident and detailing how the new policy would prevent such incidents from ever happening again. When pressed, Bucherati revealed that since only two of Coca-Cola’s staff (an estimated 139,600 employees) were working on the policy review, he wasn’t sure when it would be completed. He would keep Tomlinson apprised.

Absent any update, AIDS-Free World Co-Directors Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan wrote to Bucherati on October 6, pressing Coca-Cola to “take immediate, unmistakable, and unfaltering action to repair the harm wrought by its material support for murder musicians, such as Sizzla, immediately.” A week later, having received no reply, the Co-Directors sent a copy of their demands directly to CEO Kent and posted the letter on the organization’s web site. Immediately after, a Jamaican newspaper and a number of blogs reported details of AIDS-Free World’s demands and Coca-Cola’s lack of response.

The letter elicited no response from the head of Coca-Cola, but four days after the letter was sent to him, Mr. Bucherati replied. He claimed that letters and emails sent to him by AIDS-Free World in August and September had gotten lost, and therefore he had provided no updates on the global policy review. Two days later, a brief note from a Franchise Operations Director was published free of charge as a letter to the editor in The Gleaner. In it, the local Coke affiliate apologized for the April event and mentioned efforts to “ensure that events we sponsor are not used as platforms for espousing hatred and discrimination.”

That same day, the Co-Directors wrote again to CEO Kent, declaring that a letter to the editor from a middle-management franchise operator in The Gleaner was egregiously late and woefully inadequate, and that Kent’s absence from months of dialogue was insulting. It seemed to be a clear indication that Coca-Cola was willing to traffic in murder music, from the Board Room down.

No reply. Later that same month, the Co-Directors gave Kent an ultimatum: respond by November 4, or they would enlist the aid of allies in civil society. Their demands: place a full-page ad in every major Jamaican newspaper apologizing for what occurred and admitting wrongdoing; complete the global policy review; send a formal letter of apology; and produce a gay rights-themed concert in Washington. DC at the time of the XIX International AIDS Conference.

On November 25, seven months after the incident and six months after AIDS-Free World’s initial request for a public apology, Coca-Cola spent a portion of their $2.9 billion advertising budget on three less-than-a-quarter page open letters in the Jamaican press. The letters did not appear on letterhead, contained no logo, and were from Bucherati, not Kent.

Without any meaningful response to their demands, and swiftly approaching the year anniversary of the event, the Co-Directors and two allies spoke with Coca-Cola’s Head of Entertainment and Sports Marketing Emmanuel Seuge to formally request sponsorship of a planned gay rights/AIDS-themed concert honoring Elton John. After he was informed that Coke had yet to adequately respond to the Sizzla debacle, Mr. Seuge said he would research the request. Days later, Seuge replied that despite the importance of the cause, the window of planning was too small to build a marketing infrastructure around the event that would guarantee a profitable return. The Company was overstretched; this was especially true because of Coca-Cola’s lead sponsorship of the upcoming Summer Olympics.

Meanwhile, Bucherati emailed the Co-Directors to say that even though the global policy review had been finalized, it required “re-crafting.” He hoped that a second round of revisions would be completed by April. He said nothing as to when the new policy would be implemented.

The appropriate course of action is now clear. The company bid for the world’s attention by seeking to sponsor the Summer Olympic Games. It claims to believe — and to want the world to know — that it unequivocally supports the equal human rights of gay men and women. Mr. Kent has endless opportunities to convey that message during the Olympics. Will Coca-Cola use a portion of its airtime to assert and to demonstrate its claim, that Coca-Cola’s commitment to the equal human rights of all LGBT men and women is real?

AIDS-Free World Urges CEDAW Experts to Hold Government of Zimbabwe's Feet to the Fire

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 11:53:00 -0500

Zimbabwe is a party to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), informally known as the women's rights treaty. It is legally obligated to prevent and address violence against women under this treaty. Zimbabwe reported on its progress in complying with CEDAW this week in Geneva. AIDS-Free World has asked the CEDAW treaty body experts (the "CEDAW Committee") to recommend that the Government of Zimbabwe take serious steps to investigate, prosecute, and redress the mass rape that ZANU-PF supporters perpetrated in 2008 as part of their campaign to win the election at all costs.

Short Recommendations to CEDAW Expert Committee relating to Zimbabwe’s Combined Second to Fifth Periodic Reports Drafted by AIDS-Free World, February 2012

Background
Before, during, and immediately after the March 29, 2008 harmonized elections in Zimbabwe and the subsequent presidential run-off on June 27 of that year, members of the political party in power, ZANU-PF, undertook an organized campaign of rape against women who were affiliated with the opposition party, the MDC. AIDS-Free World documented and reported on these crimes against humanity, which remain unaddressed to this day. Despite clear evidence that ZANU-PF supporters of President Robert Mugabe utilized rape as a tool both to quell women’s political participation and as part of a broader strategy to destroy community cohesion and illegitimately win the election, no body has sought to investigate or prosecute the widespread crimes. The official silence with respect to the widespread rape of women during Zimbabwe’s 2008 makes it imperative for the CEDAW Committee to address it. AIDS-Free World has been demanding, and will continue to call for an investigation into crimes against humanity perpetrated against women by the sitting President and his ZANU-PF party, despite the recognition that the Government of Zimbabwe will neither acknowledge the possibility that such crimes were committed nor investigate or pursue justice. This impunity casts a pall over Zimbabwe as a whole, but in particular renders impossible a next round of elections that will be free, fair, and safe for women. It also creates an environment of ongoing suffering, discrimination, and trauma for the women and their families who survived this widespread sexual violence.

AIDS-Free World, concerned that widespread rape in a country with a high HIV prevalence rate exacerbated an already raging pandemic, conducted research for almost one year to ascertain the scope and intensity of alleged politically motivated rape against women in Zimbabwe. More than three hundred hours of interviews with seventy women yielded reports of 380 rapes by 241 perpetrators. In every case, the perpetrators identified themselves, through their words and their clothing, as supporters of ZANU-PF, with members of its youth militia, agents of Zimbabwe’s Central Intelligence Organization (CIO) and people who identify as veterans of the liberation war and are now affiliated with ZANU-PF committing the crimes. Each woman targeted for rape was either an MDC member or closely related to MDC supporters. The victims ranged in age from five-year-old girls to older grandmothers. The women lived in both rural and urban areas, in every province of Zimbabwe, and while all the survivors experienced tremendous difficulties in obtaining medical care for their injuries, women from the rural areas were particularly disadvantaged.

Reports from Zimbabwe indicate that violence and intimidation by ZANU-PF supporters in anticipation of the next elections, as yet unscheduled, have intensified throughout 2011 to the present.¹ Zimbabwean women have already expressed concern that their participation in elections will, again, subject them to rape and other physical violence.² The effects of the 2008 campaign of rape are long-lasting: neither the women who were raped in the last election, nor family and community members who learned of those rapes, can participate freely and without fear in any future political contest involving ZANU-PF.

As President Mugabe has repeatedly expressed and demonstrated his willingness to maintain power at all costs, politically motivated rape around the next elections is all but inevitable.³ At the October 2011 Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review of Zimbabwe, the Government of Zimbabwe rebuffed all recommendations pertaining to investigating allegations of violations and combating impunity.⁴ Such disagreement with the recommendations of the Human Rights Council does not relieve the Government of Zimbabwe of its obligations under the CEDAW.

The Government of Zimbabwe’s second through fifth periodic report to the CEDAW Committee is silent on the issue of politically motivated rape and sexual violence associated with past elections. While the next round of elections has not yet been scheduled in Zimbabwe, President Mugabe has repeatedly called for them to occur as soon as possible. We urge the CEDAW Committee to recommend that the Government of National Unity of Zimbabwe take all necessary actions to address both the previous sexual crimes against humanity and prevent a future round of rape around the next elections.

I. Recommendations relating to redress for the widespread and systematic sexual violence that occurred around the 2008 harmonized and presidential elections.

(1) Publicly condemn, at the highest levels of government, politically motivated rape against the women of Zimbabwe. Make clear through public statements that zero tolerance for such crimes will be permitted.

(2) Invest an official entity — the office of the ombudsperson, the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Human Rights, the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development — with the power to investigate the problem of rape against women in the context of past and future elections. As well, invite a delegation from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to enter the country and investigate in an unfettered and confidential manner rape occurring during the 2008 election period.

(3) Amend national law to provide for the investigation and prosecution of crimes of rape and sexual violence that rise to the level of international crimes; toward this end, the South African statute may be instructive. Such law should ensure that those convicted under such a statute are not eligible for amnesty.

(4) Create an independent Department of Public Prosecutions, separate from the Attorney General’s office, to investigate widespread rape occurring during the 2008 election period, and to conduct investigations ongoing for continued politically motivated violence. Invest the Department of Public Prosecutions with gender specialists who are expert at investigating and prosecuting crimes of sexual violence.

(5) Through the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development or some other entity, identify third-party intermediaries with the ability to conduct outreach to women in urban and rural communities regarding their experiences of politically motivated rape; such information should be obtained in a manner to protect the safety and confidentiality of respondents.

(6) Develop policies, a protocol, and an implementation process, through the Organ for National Healing or some other entity invested with power and funds, to investigate election-related rape from 2008 and award appropriate reparations to victims.

II. Recommendations relating to preventing future rape in the context of the next elections.

(1) Create the position of Women’s Desk in the ombudsman’s office, charged with monitoring election-related violence against women starting immediately.

(2) Pass new or amend existing legislation making rape during or related to elections a hate crime with enhanced sentences.

(3) Allow international election observers, in particular from African countries with respect election authorities (e.g. South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique) to enter the country immediately to observe current conditions for participation in elections; ensure that such observers have received specialized training in sexual violence associated with elections.

(4) Provide training to police forces, commencing immediately, on human rights and women’s rights, with an emphasis on preventing political rape against women.

(5) Invite peacekeepers from SADC, the African Union, and the United Nations to be deployed immediately until at least two months after the next elections, throughout the country, to prevent pre-election violence and post-election reprisals. Ensure that gender advisors are deployed as part of these peacekeeping operations.

Appendix

Zimbabwe’s obligations to address widespread politically motivated rape under international human rights and domestic law

Zimbabwe’s domestic legal obligations to address politically motivated rape are augmented by its commitments at the regional and international level. These commitments are intended to provide protection against and accountability for the kind of systematic rape that occurred in 2008.

The Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa, adopted by African Union Heads of State in July 2004, requires governments to launch campaigns against gender-based violence, strengthen laws to protect women, and end impunity for sexual crimes committed against women.

Zimbabwe has ratified the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), including the Protocol on the Rights of Women, obligating State parties to “adopt and implement appropriate measures to ensure the protection of every woman’s right to respect for her dignity and protection of women from all forms of violence, particularly sexual and verbal violence.” The Protocol specifically requires States to “punish the perpetrators of violence against women” as well as to establish programs to provide rehabilitation and reparations services to victims of such violence.

Zimbabwe is subject to the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Declaration and Treaty, including the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development, in which they committed to “ensure that perpetrators of gender-based violence, including domestic violence, rape, femicide, sexual harassment, female genital mutilation and all other forms of gender-based violence are tried by a court of competent jurisdiction.” Zimbabwe’s Parliament agreed to ratify the Protocol on October 21, 2009. Zimbabwe signed the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Declaration on Gender and Development of 1997, through which it promised to incorporate gender issues into its programme. Finally, Zimbabwe is a member of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), which guides member states through its gender policy to carry out gender mainstreaming and women’s human rights.

As a party to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Zimbabwe is obligated to prevent gender-based violence, which constitutes discrimination.

Zimbabwe is also a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the right to life, the right to move freely, freedom from arbitrary detention, the right to participate in the government, the right to equality and non-discrimination, and a prohibition on torture, among others.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) protects children from discrimination on the basis of the status, activities, expressed opinions or beliefs of the child’s parents, legal guardians, or family members. Zimbabwe has ratified the CRC. Its failure to protect female children from sexual violence, as well as its unwillingness to investigate and prosecute those who commit sexual crimes against children, contravene its obligations under this treaty.

Zimbabwe ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which requires the government to take positive action to protect the right to health. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of Everyone to the Enjoyment of the Highest Attainable Standard of Physical and Mental Health articulated this action as “measures to protect vulnerable or marginalized groups, in particular women, children, adolescents, and older persons, in the light of gender-based expressions of violence.” Zimbabwe’s failure to prevent and punish gender-based crimes of violence constitutes a violation of the right to health.

Zimbabwe’s Constitution prohibits discrimination against women in its by section 23(2) (as amended by Constitutional Amendment 17 of 2005). While the Criminal Law Act, in chapter 9:23, prohibits rape (including marital rape) and sex trafficking, it does not recognize or criminalize widespread or systematic rape or rape as a crime against humanity. Consequently, mass rape can only be prosecuted on a case-by-case basis in Zimbabwean courts. Additionally, the principle of command responsibility, which permits the prosecution of high level or senior officials who order their subordinates to carry out rape, is not enshrined in Zimbabwe law, making it impossible to prosecute anyone other than that the direct perpetrators. The Draft National Gender-Based Violence Strategy of 2005 and its accompanying Action Plan make no mention of addressing widespread or systematic rape, such as occurred during the 2008 elections.

1 See, e.g., Human Rights Watch, World Report 2012: Zimbabwe, available at http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-zimbabwe-0; Terence Karimakwenda, “ZANU PF Violence intensifies in Mbare,” SW Radio Africa, January 19, 2012, available at http://www.swradioafrica.com/2012/01/27/zanu-pf-violence-intensifies-in-mbare/; “Political violence likely to characterise forthcoming elections,” Zimbabwe Daily News, January 25, 2012, available at http://dailynews.co.zw/index.php/news/34-news/6716-political-violence-likely-to-characterise-forthcoming-elections.html.
2 Tabitha Mutenga, “Women wary about elections in 2012,” Financial Gazette, January 6, 2012, available at http://www.financialgazette.co.zw/national-report/11037-women-wary-about-elections-in-2012-.html.
3 Geoffrey York, “In Mugabe’s entourage, suspicion of a political murder,” The Globe and Mail, February 14, 2012 (“Reports from Zimbabwe suggest that Mr. Mugabe intends to win one more election – by hook or by crook....”), available at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/worldview/in-mugabes-entourage-suspicion-of-a-political-murder/article2337758/.
4 See H.E. Patrick Chinamasa, Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs, Final Remarks, UPR Report of Zimbabwe, October 12, 2011, available at http://www.unmultimedia.org/tv/webcast/2011/10/final-remarks-upr-report-of-zimbabwe-12th-universal-periodic-review.html.

The UN’s Gag Order on Reproductive Health

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:13:00 -0500

Invitees who attended back-to-back World Health Organization (WHO) consultations at the start of February were required to sign confidentiality agreements prohibiting them from talking about the meetings. They had to promise not to divulge anything that was said during the three days — not to colleagues, not to their networks, and especially not to journalists, who might misreport the facts. The world health body explained that journalists often exaggerate, and the UN doesn’t want to induce panic. The media will be informed when WHO holds an additional meeting of UN insiders on February 15, behind closed doors, and prepares a carefully worded public statement for release the next day.

The highly classified topic of discussion wasn’t a nuclear threat or a new virus that can kill within days. It was birth control.

WHO’s gag order is just the latest in a years-long effort by the United Nations’ AIDS apparatus to limit how much women know about possible links between HIV and injectable hormonal contraceptives. The UN appears to have forgotten that its job is not to control women’s sexual and reproductive decisions, but to inform them.

Here’s what the UN knows: In July 2011, researchers led by Renee Heffron at the University of Washington in Seattle presented findings from studies involving 3,790 sero-discordant couples (one HIV-negative and one HIV-positive partner) in east and southern Africa.¹ The data compared women who had and women who had not used hormonal contraceptives during the research periods: twice as many HIV-negative hormonal contraceptive users acquired the virus. The rates of transmission from HIV-positive women to their male partners was also two times higher for users of hormonal contraceptives. (The findings focused on injectables because very few study participants took hormonal contraceptives in pill form, making the higher rates of HIV infection and transmission in that group “statistically insignificant.”)

In laypersons’ terms, hormonal contraceptives are products that adjust a woman’s hormone levels to prevent ovulation and pregnancy. In the east and southern African countries where the research was carried out, injectable hormonal contraceptives (“depot medroxyprogesterone acetate,” or DMPA) are the top choice of women who use contraceptives, and the Depo-Provera brand owned by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc. is the most widely used. Despite common side effects, popular features of the method are that one injection lasts three months, and a woman’s sex partner need not know that she is using a contraceptive.

The findings by Heffron and colleagues weren’t definitive; it would take years of additional research to determine beyond a doubt whether or not hormonal contraceptives actually double women’s risks of acquiring or transmitting HIV during unprotected sex. But the research team was concerned enough last July to say: “Our findings argue for policies to counsel women about the potential for increased HIV-1 risk with hormonal contraceptive use, especially injectable DMPA use, and the importance of dual protection with condoms to decrease HIV-1 risk.”

WHO and UNAIDS were not shocked. They had known for years that other research had linked sub-Saharan Africa’s most widely used form of birth control to higher rates of HIV. They knew about Depo-Provera users’ three-fold rates of chlamydia² and of gonorrhea,³ two of the sexually transmitted infections that place people at high risk of HIV,and about research showing that condom use decreased when women started using Depo-Provera.⁴ They were aware that women’s health advocates have been battling drug companies and policymakers for decades over Depo-Provera on a range of issues, including the ethics of clinical trials in developing countries, and the contraceptive’s connection to breast cancer and to health hazards that warrant a “black box” label, the US Food and Drug Administration’s most dire warning. The UN was aware that the new data on HIV and injectable hormones raised new questions about the safety of a method that women cannot reverse for three months. They knew all this and much more, but hadn’t conducted a systematic review of the best evidence since 2009, when an official guidance document (which included a small-print statement that “potential drug interactions between many antiretroviral drugs and hormonal contraceptives might alter the safety and effectiveness of both”), nevertheless concluded that “women at high risk of HIV infection and those who are living with HIV can safely use hormonal methods.”⁵ The new evidence presented by Heffron et al didn’t cause the UN to move faster.

On the contrary, WHO reacted in July 2011 to the latest and most concerning observational data (uncovered in the process of looking for something else) by announcing that they had scheduled a ‘technical consultation’ for February 2012, seven months down the road. But in the interim, on October 4th, Heffron and colleagues published their research in The Lancet, and it was reported in The New York Times. Word began trickling down, by word of mouth and in distorted versions, to contraceptive users in east and southern Africa. Even then, neither WHO nor UNAIDS felt obligated to address women’s questions, quell the rumors, or correct the misinformation that naturally circulated in the absence of facts. The February 2012 meeting wasn’t moved up. Unlike swine flu, which gave rise to nine Emergency Committee meetings at WHO before it eventually killed roughly 19,000 people worldwide, no urgent response was triggered by the threat of a doubled HIV risk for 20 million hormonal contraceptive users on a continent where tens of millions have died of AIDS. WHO made no effort to send a balanced, cautionary message out to the general public. No information was issued to government health officials, nor to the healthcare providers who offer birth control or HIV testing, prevention, and treatment services; no one was reminded to stress the need, now more important than ever, of using condoms along with hormonal contraceptives. No attempts were made to make male and female condoms more widely available to hormonal contraceptive users, at prices and in quantities that could encourage their use, and no public information campaigns have been initiated to spread the word.

WHO and UNAIDS each posted statements on their websites—separate ones, with different messages—which were seen by people who regularly comb the WHO and UNAIDS websites. WHO’s statement did not remind those readers about the importance of condom use.⁶ But both statements offered disturbing insights into why the UN was withholding information from hormonal contraceptive users — 20 million in sub Saharan Africa, including 12 million who make use of injectable methods and 8 million who opt for pills. They were afraid that African women might abandon hormonal contraceptives altogether. That would result in more pregnancies. More pregnancies would lead to more maternal deaths, since pregnancy is especially risky for women who have HIV. More unintended pregnancies might cause more women to undergo unsafe abortions. And if more HIV-positive women went through with pregnancy, that would put more babies at risk of infections.

Those possibilities are all real. So is the possibility that hormonal contraceptive use will increase a woman’s risk of HIV infection.

But it’s not the right of the United Nations to make that choice for a woman.

Says the UN, when it’s speaking in public:

“The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health…”⁷ and

“Failure to provide information, services and conditions to help women protect their reproduction health…constitutes gender-based discrimination and a violation of women’s rights to health and life.”⁸

WHO and UNAIDS have violated human rights by withholding the information. They have failed to inform women that using hormonal contraceptives may carry some risk, and that it is especially important now for women who use them to protect themselves and their partners from HIV by using condoms at the same time.

Women have the right to make fully informed sexual and reproductive health decisions, whether or not the UN likes those decisions.

AIDS-Free World asked a WHO spokesperson how the agency would communicate to women after their February consultation. She answered that they hadn’t thought much about it; mass communication isn’t WHO’s strength. Perhaps they’d publish an article in a medical journal and in The New York Times. They certainly would welcome our input. We asked if we could attend the February meeting, and were told that, “As our capacity for participants is limited, we have representatives from UNAIDS, IPPF, the International Coalition of Women Living with HIV/AIDS and the Family Life Association of Swaziland attending the consultation. We apologize for not being able to accommodate additional organizations and representatives.” (We eventually got hold of the participants’ list. Invitations were issued to 81 people, just one representing women living with HIV. Of the 61 non-UN staff, nearly half were experts from the US.)

AIDS-Free World turned to UNAIDS (the body responsible for coordinating all the UN’s AIDS work, ensuring no overlap and no gaps) with an appeal to hold an urgent meeting in conjunction with the early February consultation WHO was planning. We asked the Executive Director to gather a small group of communications experts to help the UN develop a rapid dissemination plan. That way, right after the WHO technical meetings, UNAIDS would be ready to disseminate clear, factual information through every possible channel to reach the women who need it. We argued that the UN’s information lockdown had to end: women who are making decisions that have to do with sex and birth control and HIV have the right to know what the UN does knows and what it doesn’t yet know — today.

On December 13, the UNAIDS Executive Director replied: “I am pleased for UNAIDS to help convene all partners to take forward this communications meeting.” UNAIDS would host; the timing and venue were settled. A week later, his staff backed out of the commitment. On second thought, UNAIDS thought such a meeting would be premature. And expensive. Sometimes teleconference calls are a more efficient way to plan global strategies than in-person working sessions. And (said the UN’s AIDS coordinating body) their WHO colleagues might perceive a UNAIDS meeting as “oppositional” to theirs.

I traveled instead to east Africa, where 40 women — women’s rights advocates, researchers, medical professionals, HIV and reproductive health counselors, activist women living with HIV from Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Uganda, South Africa, Kenya and the US – met to discuss what we wanted the UN to hear from women at its technical consultation. After just half a day of discussion, there was consensus, including:

“It is not sufficient to say that the data are mixed and we need more research…. Clear information must be provided now on the potential risks of both HCT use and pregnancy. Women need clear and balanced information on what is known and unknown.”

“Women will not be divided by issues of various risks — the response cannot pit contraceptives versus maternal mortality. We don’t accept an “either/or” approach. Both problems need to be addressed.”

Because WHO couldn’t squeeze an additional chair for AIDS-Free World into its conference hall, we only know what was leaked from those meetings by several different attendees — including UN staff. They had taken the confidentiality agreement with a grain of salt: researchers can ask for signed assurances that their unpublished data won’t be quoted, but WHO’s prohibition against discussing anything raised during three full days seemed a bit overwrought. Speculation swirled about who has WHO so spooked: the American pharmaceutical companies that see hormonal contraceptives as a growth industry? Participating “experts” with ties to those companies?

In an ironic twist, the gag order prohibited the one African civil society representative who was invited to speak on behalf of the continent’s HIV-positive women from reporting back to her network about what she had heard and learned. That’s a new twist on the solemn UN principle of “Greater Involvement of People Living with HIV/AIDS.” It’s a new definition of “stakeholder” and a frightening new direction for facts about African women and HIV: information now flows in reverse, toward Geneva, where it’s held in a reservoir until WHO allows it to trickle out.

The UN has promised to release a statement on February 16. The communications departments of UNAIDS and WHO will work together on the wording. Their joint “communications plan” will then amount to sending a statement to the clogged inboxes of Ministers of Health, sending a press release to media outlets, and waiting to see who bites. On Thursday, then, it will suddenly become the job of journalists to distribute life-and-death health information to the world’s women — the same journalists who can’t be trusted by WHO to get the facts straight.

AIDS advocacy organizations and women’s rights groups have questions for WHO and UNAIDS as they prepare their statement. Haven’t the past 30 years taught us that information is the single most important weapon against HIV? Isn’t the UN in the business of advancing women’s rights to make their own informed decisions about sex and reproduction? Doesn’t the UN argue that there are enough men telling women and girls what they can and can’t do with their lives and their bodies — enough husbands and fathers and brothers, in-laws and clergy and heads of state robbing women of the right to make sexual and reproductive decisions? Doesn’t the right to information apply to African women, women who are living with HIV, and women with strong chances of contracting HIV? Doesn’t the UN in Geneva — which can never know the unique circumstances of women’s lives — trust informed women to weigh risks and benefits, and to make decisions for themselves?

And lastly, this far into the Information Age, shouldn’t UNAIDS and WHO have a better communication strategy than the blind hope that life-saving information will find its way to the world’s women from The Lancet and The New York Times?

Download a copy of this statement (PDF, 197 KB)

1 Heffron R, et al., “Use of hormonal contraceptives and risk of HIV-1 transmission: a prospective cohort study,” Lancet Infectious Diseases 2012 Jan;12(1):19-26. The study was funded by the Gates Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

2 Morrison, Charles S, et al., “Hormonal Contraceptive Use, Cervical Ectopy, and the Acquisition of Cervical Infections,” Sexually Transmitted Diseases, September 2004 Vol. 31, No. 9, p. 561-567.

3 Lavreys L, et al. "Hormonal contraception and risk of cervical infections among HIV-1-seropositive Kenyan women,” AIDS, 2004 Nov 5;18(16):2179-84.

4 Sangi-Haghpeykar H, Posner SF, Poindexter AN 3rd, “Consistency of condom use among low-income hormonal contraceptive users,” Perspect Sex Reprod Health. 2005 Dec;37(4):184-91.

5 WHO, Medical Eligibiity Criteria for Contraceptive Use, 2009.

6 http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2011/WHO_RHR_11.28_eng.pdf

7 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, paragraph 96.

8 http://www.unfpa.org/gender/empowerment.htm

For more information:
Paula Donovan
TEL: +1-781-734-0330
pd@aidsfreeworld.org

Global Commission on HIV and the Law: Criminal Law as a Risk Factor for MSM

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:41:00 -0500

Regressive laws endanger LGBTI individuals

International human rights law has slowly progressed in recent years to better ensure that people of all sexual orientations and gender identities can exercise their human rights.¹ Yet recent years have also witnessed the increasing criminalization of sexual minorities, particularly men who have sex with men (MSM), in many countries. This rise in criminalization and homophobia often means that the proportion of MSM who contract HIV remains very high, as many are simply too traumatized or afraid to seek treatment, or even to carry condoms to protect themselves, and governments make no attempts to reach them with targeted information, prevention, or treatment services.

“I pay tribute to the young homosexuals who died in anonymity without anyone caring about them. Today I want to cry out and express my anger. And there’s every reason to be angry.”—activist from Cameroon

Currently 76 countries in the world outlaw homosexual acts.² Punishments range from monetary fines to the death penalty. Many of these discriminatory laws in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are remnants of colonization; within the Commonwealth of Nations, an association of countries once ruled by Great Britain, 40 out of 51 member states continue to criminalize homosexuality in some form. In some instances, it is right-wing Christian movements from the United States that are seeking to strengthen and reinvigorate these legal relics from colonial times, as a way to spread their anti-gay agenda around the world.

The testimony given to the Global Commission on HIV and the Law brought the discrimination against MSM into frighteningly vivid focus. Individuals whose lives are at risk on a daily basis, either because of their sexual orientation or gender identity or merely for supporting MSM advocacy, told their stories. Here are just a few examples, given by activists during the Global Commission’s Regional Dialogues, of the crimes perpetrated against them.

Murder

• “‘Social cleansing’…is committed by neighbors or strangers whose primary aim is to eliminate gay and transgender people from the neighborhood or community. ‘Social cleansing’ appears to be the main source of the murders of LGBT people.” — activist from Honduras

• “Within the last year, more than 20 trans and gay people have been assassinated. These are the only ones that we have been able to detect through out networks and friends in the community.” — activist from Guatemala

• “Although incidences of violence, harassment and murder against people who live with HIV and have a different sexual orientation than heterosexuality continue in Latin America, there is no real response from the state or a true public response to the situation.” — activist from Colombia

Torture

• “A number of men in MSM networks in Trinidad who sought sexual partners on an extremely popular internet site began to fall victim to a pattern of opportunistic crimes. In the worst instances they were kidnapped, tortured, robbed, anally gang-raped and threatened with blackmail if they reported the crimes.” — activist from Trinidad & Tobago

• “‘Corrective’ rapes of lesbians to ‘make them straight’ are not uncommon” — lawyer from Jamaica

Abuse by the state and by law enforcement

• “I was 24 when I was imprisoned unfairly on the basis of my sexual orientation and my HIV status.” — activist from Ivory Coast

• “The police use condoms as evidence to arrest people, close down entertainment venues and thus hamper prevention efforts. MSM are compelled not to carry condoms…” — NGO submission from Thailand

• “Recent reports indicate that there is an increasing number of Caribbean nationals seeking political asylum in the UK and North America on the basis that they fear persecution on account of their sexual orientation.” — lawyer from St. Lucia

The deadly link with HIV

Expert evidence provided to the Commission demonstrates that the criminalization of sexual orientation and gender identity has a devastating impact on HIV prevention work and on access to health care generally. In addition, the activists at the Regional Dialogues articulated ways that the criminalization of MSM has made them increasingly vulnerable to HIV:

• “The HIV prevalence rate among Jamaican men who have sex with men (MSM) is 32% as against 1.6% in the general population… The criminalization of male same-sex conduct not only breeds homophobic violence; it also systematically drives Jamaican lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals underground, away from effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support interventions.” — lawyer from Jamaica

• “HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men in Trinidad & Tobago has been measured at 20%, four to eight times higher than estimated national rates of HIV.” — activist from Trinidad & Tobago

• “…the majority of MSM meet in conditions of secrecy and imminent risk, in places without guarantee of physical, emotional or personal security.” — activist from Mexico

• “[The laws against MSM] preclude the distribution of condoms in Jamaican prisons with the result that the HIV prevalence rate among inmates is twice the national average.” — lawyer from Jamaica

• “These narratives [from MSM] illustrate a sense that they have no confidence that health care providers, protective services, or even NGOs specializing in support for victims of sexual violence will not simply re-victimize them.” — activist from Trinidad & Tobago

Debates, Controversy, Challenges

Government officials attending the Regional Dialogues often expressed resistance to slowing or reversing the criminalization of MSM. Many claimed that they were merely supporting overall public opinion, and that they were unable to change their laws until “society changes first.” Activists argued strongly that the law exists to protect and defend people, and the state has a duty to all individuals — governments will never halt HIV if they only address “moral” people and exclude those they see as “immoral.”

AIDS-Free World Says…

AIDS-Free World denounces, in no uncertain terms, the criminalization of LGBTQI identities and the criminalization of any same-sex behavior. Not only does this criminalization violate human rights law, it has and will continue to serve as a death sentence for individuals all over the world — allowing them to be targeted for brutal violence, and putting them at a heightened, and completely unnecessary, risk of HIV.

There is an area of the Global Commission’s work where the need for a rights-based legal environment is painfully clear — an environment where religions, societies, or cultures that discriminate are kept in check, an environment where the law works to defend and protect individuals, and where culture is never used as justification for the violation of fundamental human rights.

AIDS-Free World has focused our organizational work in this area on the Caribbean, and we have just presented the first-ever legal challenge to Jamaica’s anti-gay laws. Read more about the legal challenge here.

The Commission on HIV and the Law Says…

The final report of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law will be released in the first half of 2012.

¹ See The Yogyakarta Principles: The Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, available at http://yogyakartaprinciples.org/; See also CESCR, General Comment No. 14 (2000): The right to the highest attainable standard of health (article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), U.N. Doc. E/C.12/2000/4, (11/8/00), para. 18.

² State-sponsored Homophobia: A world survey of laws criminalizing same sex sexual acts between consenting adults. The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association. Available at http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/1161.

Global Commission on HIV and the Law: Criminal Law as a Risk Factor for IDUs

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:58:00 -0500

The links between HIV and the criminalization of injecting drug users generated significant discussion amongst the activists and government representatives who participated in the Regional Dialogues. Here are some of the voices that emerged.

Injecting drug users said…

• “I have often been ill-treated only for the fact that I am a drug user and I was repeatedly tortured during interrogation.” — man from Ukraine

• “In country there is no state rehabilitation program. There is no substitution therapy. The country has violated the rights, according to some estimates, of several million people. Several million drug users who are denied the right to be human.” — woman from Russia

• “Policies on drugs and HIV are often developed separately, with neither coordination nor coherence.” — NGO submission from Nepal

• “Campaigns against drug users include…stigmatizing media coverage, public beatings of drug users, and public shame.” — woman from Nepal

• “There was, and is still, no clean injecting equipment available in Thai prisons, or opiate substitution therapy.” — NGO submission from Thailand

• “Criminal charges against IDUs because of drug use mainly leads to their arrest. Despite the fact that the judicial authority shall decide on compulsory treatment of IDUs in prisons, no such treatment and rehabilitation programs exist. At the same time in the prisons of the country there is no methadone program.” — woman from Azerbaijan

• “Quite a big number of prison inmates are drug users, who continue to inject and usually tens of people share the same needle, which exposes them to extremely high risk of transmission of HIV and other blood infections.” — NGO submission from Bulgaria

• “On the basis of the substance abuse records in which I was registered when I first asked for medical help, I became a man whose rights are violated and can continue to be violated. For example, information about my diagnosis and my drug use were disclosed without my consent and on that basis that my driver’s license was taken away, even though I have not used any drugs for the past 7 months. This is a mass practice in our country and my city. Many of my friends have already suffered. This arbitrariness continues. Because of the [substance abuse] record we have many other difficulties, for instance with employment and education.” — man from Russia

• “Most of our drug policies are still punitive, embracing a ‘quit or die’ approach.” — man from Nigeria

• “These debates cannot ignore the consequences of drug control policies in the region: social isolation, disproportionate numbers of drug users and 'mules' incarcerated, social violence, environmental damage and violations of basic human rights.” — woman from Argentina

Women and Injecting Drug Use

Why are women in Eastern Europe and Central Asia who inject drugs reported to be at a higher risk of acquiring HIV than men?:¹
(1) They are reported frequently being “second on the needle” after men when sharing injection equipment.
(2) There is a significant overlap between drug use and sex work, and many women who inject drugs will exchange sex for drugs. UNAIDS estimates that 35 percent of women living with HIV in Eastern Europe and Central Asia acquired the virus through injecting drug use, and a further 50 percent were infected through unsafe sex with partners who inject drugs.
(3) Female drug users are frequently denied health care, and many reported judgmental attitudes by health care providers.
(4) Female drug users experience high levels of poverty, incarceration, and domestic violence – all risk factors for HIV.

Debates, Controversy, Challenges…

Regional differences quickly came to light. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the only part of the world where HIV rates remain on the rise, the pandemic is heavily concentrated amongst injecting drug users. In contrast, there was only one submission at the African Regional Dialogue addressing injecting drug use and HIV, although activists warned of a looming crisis as drug trafficking through West Africa continues to rise.

Government representatives at the Regional Dialogues were reticent to address the issue. Russia, a country repeatedly shamed by the human rights community for its regressive, brutal drug policies, refused to send any government representation to the Eastern Europe Regional Dialogue. During the African Regional Dialogue, some of the government representatives left the room during the discussions about injecting drug use so as not to be associated with the topic. Other government representatives expressed fear that if they called for the decriminalization of injecting drug use, they would be criticized for promoting drug use or encouraging the legalization of all drugs and drug trafficking. Experts invited to present informed opinions to the Commissioners and the civil society participants at the Regional Dialogues responded thoroughly to these concerns. Here is a small sample of the debates that took place.

POINT	COUNTERPOINT
Only injecting drug use directly spreads HIV, through the sharing of needles, and in the context of HIV and the law, this is the only type of drug use that policymakers should address.	• Criminal prosecutions for possession of drug use place huge numbers of people who use drugs of any kind in state custody, in conditions where their vulnerability to HIV is further heightened. • A comprehensive harm reduction program for injecting drug users includes switching to snorting or smoking drugs. If the Commission only calls for injecting drug use to decriminalized, rather than encouraging harm reduction, they would be calling for approaches that could potentially encourage people to inject. • Recent epidemiology suggests stimulants are also major drivers of the HIV epidemic.
Depriving injecting drug users of drugs will reduce drug consumption.	• Injecting drug users are placed in jail for long sentences, and in many countries prisons do not provide any form of substitution therapy or syringe exchange. As a result, most continue to inject drugs but are forced to use covertly and to share dirty needles in prison, placing them at high risk of contracting hepatitis C or HIV. This deprivation ultimately becomes a death sentence because in many countries prisoners receive no medical treatment for tuberculosis, hepatitis C or HIV.
If governments take a strong stance on injecting drug use, they will be criticized for calling for the legalization of all drug use and drug trafficking.	• Governments should amend their laws to decriminalize drug use not for trafficking. This will allow countries to implement harm reduction, focus on critical, life-saving public health measures, and protect the human rights of individual drug users who are not causing harm to others.
It is sufficient to recommend that countries decriminalize the possession of “small amounts of drugs.”	• Russia and other countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have already decriminalized trace amounts of drugs. Some activists from the region requested the Commission to specifically call for “decriminalization for the purpose of personal use.” • Others urged the Commission to specifically state that threshold amounts that are deemed for “personal use” should not be set so law as to render decriminalization illusory in reality – in many countries incredibly small amounts of a prohibited substance are deemed to be “large” and attract serious penal consequences.

AIDS-Free World Says…

The testimony provided to the Global Commission at the Eastern Europe and Central Asia Regional Dialogue was heartbreaking. The laws and policies inflicted daily on people who use drugs violate their human rights and their basic humanity. Activists from these countries recounted the long string of abuses they have faced because of their drug use — from the denial of methadone, to police extortion, to the lack of adequate legal aid, to interrogation and torture, to long prison sentences without any basic medical care or treatment for HIV. Those who emerge from the grip of incarceration and try to restart their lives are often placed on national drug registries, allowing the state to deny them social support or employment, to arbitrarily arrest them again, or to take their children away. The system is simply stacked against them from the very beginning. Within a context of rising HIV rates, these policies are regressive and unconscionable — and even more so because the spread of the virus is preventable.

“At some point, reasonable people must surely recognize that injecting drug use is an illness, a public health issue, not a target for punitive attack, or incarceration, or assault by the police. The mentality is profoundly warped … it’s as though injecting drug users weren’t human, and this environment of personal malice turns into the malice of the state.... When you have a conspiracy of hate directed against a vulnerable group, you can almost be certain that they’ll go underground, they won’t get tested, they won’t turn to prevention or treatment or care, and your prevalence rates for AIDS will soar through the roof.” — AIDS-Free World Co-Director Stephen Lewis

AIDS-Free World stands behind all of the courageous activists who came forward to testify and who work on these issues every day in incredibly difficult circumstances. We will continue to advocate for harm reduction, for drug policies driven by public health goals, and for the human rights of people who use drugs.

Remarks by Maurice Tomlinson, Receiving the Inaugural "David Kato Vision and Voice Award"

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

I would like to start off with a number of humble thank-yous. Thank you all for the tremendous honor bestowed on me this evening. Thank you to the International Planned Parenthood Federation for the vision in establishing and creating this Award. (Thank you Kevin for planting the seed a little over a year ago to the day!) To all on the Steering Committee (and to Frank its chairperson) and supporters who helped give a tangible shape to that vision. To all the fabulous people who worked tirelessly to organize this equally fabulous event—thanks in particular to Alastair, Daniel, Fiona, and the resource mobilization team at IPPF — you have all done David’s memory proud.

I would also like to thank my organization, AIDS-Free World, for allowing me to do the job that I love; Metropolitan Community Churches, in Toronto and around the world, for innumerable expressions of concern about my safety; my dear husband Tom for his nervous caution about my well-being; all the brave lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and around the world who remain unbowed in their determination to realize their full human rights; my still divided family for at least remaining open to me; my students for being curious about tolerance; and my country Jamaica for allowing a remarkable dialogue to take place about the very sensitive issue of human rights for homosexuals.

Pioneer and pariah are just two of the epithets I am sure that have been used to describe David Kato, because of his unwavering commitment to advocating for the full human rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people. However, I prefer to think David desperately fought, and ultimately gave his life, simply to make it easier for people like him, to go about our regular mundane lives contributing to the development of our families, countries, regions and the world. David sought to do this in his quiet unassuming way; focusing on documenting, educating about and responding to human rights abuses against LGBT in his beautiful country of Uganda. I try to do the same thing in my equally wonderful homeland Jamaica, which this year is celebrating its 50th year of independence.

I think what motivated David was a deep and abiding faith in the goodness of all humankind, especially his fellow countrymen. I am sure he felt that if his people only knew what tremendous harm intolerance and homophobia were causing to countless of their fellow citizens — including the spread of HIV as a result of vulnerable groups being forced underground away from effective prevention, treatment, care and support interventions — then all Ugandans would, in one voice, call for an end to such acts of cruel inhumanity. That is why he vigorously opposed the draconian and despicably medieval anti-homosexuality bill which was before the Ugandan parliament. And that is quite possibly why he was so savagely murdered.

Jamaica has been described as the most homophobic place on earth; one Ugandan commented that David’s murder reminded him of the type of homophobic attacks usually reported from Jamaica. One such attack was the brutal and barbaric slaying on October 18, 2011, of a 16-year-old youth, Oshane Gordon in the resort city of Montego Bay. Early in the morning, a gang of thugs barged into Oshane’s home and slashed him on his foot to slow his escape as he tried to flee through a window. When they caught up with Oshane, the men finished him off with several more blows from their machetes. Oshane was killed because of “questionable relations” with another man and his mother was also severely cut up for harboring him.

Since 2009, AIDS-Free World has been engaged in an ambitious and aggressive program in partnership with the major LGBT group on the island, J-FLAG, aimed at documenting human rights abuses against homosexual Jamaicans. We were motivated to undertake this work by the vastly disproportionate level of HIV prevalence among Jamaican MSM (about 32%) as against a prevalence rate of 1.6% in the general population. This MSM HIV prevalence rate is about the highest in the world and there is evidence that the country’s notorious homophobia is a major contributor. Between 2009 and 2011 there has been a near 300% increase in the number of human rights violations against LGBT reported to J-FLAG, and highlighting these abuses has resulted in very supportive statements for the human rights of LGBT by Jamaican leaders of all stripes. Most noteworthy was a declaration during the December 2011 election leadership debate by Jamaica’s new Prime Minister, the Honourable Portia Simpson-Miller, that she rejected the homophobia of her predecessor, Bruce Golding, and would have no objections to appointing gays to her cabinet. She also stated that she would bring the matter of reviewing the country’s nineteenth century British colonial anti-sodomy law to a conscience vote in Parliament. While she was viciously attacked for her leadership on this contentious issue during the election campaign, she bravely stood her ground and the Jamaican electorate rewarded her and her party with a 2/3 majority in Parliament.

I see Prime Minister Simpson-Miller’s views as representing what I and my dear mother consider the true Jamaican “One Love” culture. As my mother tells it, during her youth, everyone knew at least one person in the village who was gay, but no one cared. People respected the privacy of others and the anti-sodomy law was rarely, if ever, invoked. There certainly were no marauding mobs seeking to eradicate gays from the society. However, all this changed during the 1980’s and 90’s when there was a coarsening of Jamaican society through a deliberate export of hate and intolerance to Jamaica by, ironically, American televangelists. These preachers spawned sick replicas of themselves in the form of local religious leaders who poured a steady stream of poisoning homophobia into the ears of their congregants on an almost weekly basis. Many of their parishioners and choristers consisted of young impressionable individuals who would later go on to record some of the most hateful homophobic songs on earth. These songs (over 200 of them at last count) contributed to a vortex of hate that swirled unchecked for many years and resulted in numerous assaults, mob attacks, extortion, and murder of Jamaican LGBT.

The previously unused law then became a fixture, and police — who are after all products of their society — started to extort, attack, or ignore attacks on gays who were perceived as unapprehended criminals. Despite the obvious harm caused by the existence of the anti-sodomy law, our independence constitution exempted it from judicial review. Last year, Jamaica completed a 12-year process of reviewing the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, but, sadly, the anti-sodomy law was once again “saved” from review by any domestic courts. So in August 2011, AIDS-Free World, on behalf of two gay Jamaicans, filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on the grounds that the anti-buggery violates numerous human rights found in the American Convention on Human Rights to which Jamaica is a party. I hope the new Jamaican PM will make this legal challenge redundant by simply calling for the conscience vote as she has promised.

A repeal of the law will not result in an immediate end to homophobia in Jamaica, in the same way homophobia still persists in the UK decades after the law was consigned to history. Sadly, evangelical Christian groups from North America are still funding and supporting a vicious fight to deny the human rights of Jamaican LGBT. However, one thing the law’s repeal will do is provide gay Jamaicans leverage when they seek assistance from police in the face of attack. When I first started receiving death threats as a result of my advocacy, I made an initial report to the police. The officer who received my report went off on a homophobic tirade stating, among other things, that he hates gays and that they make him sick. As a lawyer, I sat there stunned at the level of sheer unprofessionalism displayed by this agent of law enforcement. I later reported the matter to an Assistant Commissioner of Police (who was recruited from Britain and is financially supported by the UK) and he told me that such attitudes are unfortunate but they will not change until the law changes. The fact is, the anti-buggery law makes me — at least to Jamaican police — an unapprehended criminal with few, if any, human rights.

I fled Jamaica on January 10, 2011 after my marriage to Tom was made public when the Jamaica Observer newspaper (which is owned by Butch Stewart of “Sandals” Resort fame) published an unauthorized photo of our wedding on their web site. Even though I requested that the newspaper remove the picture because of the real threats it posed to my safety, they have refused. Since then I have started receiving a steady stream of death threats. I would like to return to Jamaica to continue teaching law at the University of Technology, Jamaica, as well as assist J-FLAG with their documentation and reporting of LGBT human rights violations, but I simply do not feel that the Jamaican police force would protect me. The Inter-American Commission has written to them twice on my behalf and they have failed to respond. So I may have to continue my work in exile, away from my mother, students, and my home. But I hope one day this vortex of hate will end, and I can once again return to the warmth of my amazing country, to teach my inspiring students, and be able to sit and chat with my mother after a wonderful bowl of her fabulous “Saturday soup.”

Until then, Mr. Chair, I promise, in David Kato's name, that I will never abandon my role in the struggle for the full human rights of LGBT until those rights are universally achieved.

Thank you.

For additional information, please contact:
Christina Magill
AIDS-Free World
TEL: +1-416-657-4458
clm@aidsfreeworld.org

Global Commission on HIV and the Law: Women and HIV

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Global Commission on HIV and the Law was formed to interrogate the relationship between human rights, HIV, and legal responses. Officially launched in July 2010 by the United Nations Development Programme, the Commission was tasked with forming evidence-informed recommendations that will spur national, regional, and global action to protect the human rights of people living with and vulnerable to HIV.

The Commission held 7 Regional Dialogues during 2010 and 2011. Over 1000 submissions were sent to the Commission from groups of people living with HIV, from lawyers and activists and grassroots organizations, from those negatively affected by laws and seeking to make change through the legal system. First-hand testimony from these individuals was given over the course of seven regional dialogues held in Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. Activists presented their concerns to both the Commissioners and to the government representatives from their region invited to attend the dialogues.

The Global Commission had four areas of focus, one of which was "law and practices that mitigate or sustain violence and discrimination as lived by women." Of the many injustices that allow HIV to spread, gender discrimination is perhaps the most pervasive and deadly. Women have disproportionately higher rates of HIV globally; they also bear the burden of caring for the sick and the dying even as they are denied the knowledge, the resources, and the autonomy to protect themselves. The continued trampling on the human rights of women drives the AIDS pandemic.

How is HIV disproportionately impacting women?

• In sub-Saharan Africa, the region most impacted by the epidemic, women account for 80% of new HIV infections.¹
• In the Caribbean, the second most highly affected region in the world, HIV prevalence is twice as high among young women than among young men.²
• In the United States, HIV was the first leading cause of death for African-American women ages 25-34, and the third leading cause of death for all women ages 35-44.³

The law is heavily implicated in discussions of women and HIV because most legal systems are deeply rooted in patriarchy. In many countries laws do not mandate equality for women or prohibit gender discrimination. Even when laws are on the books to prohibit gender discrimination, legal systems are rarely used diligently or effectively to prosecute rapists, or to remedy other violations of women’s human rights. Women attempting to seek justice face stigmatization and abuse from police, doctors, prosecutors, and judges, who often deride or ignore their experiences of violence or deny them the information and resources they need to make informed choices about their health.

The Report from the Commission — with recommendations and summaries — won’t be available until later in 2012, but discussions on women’s issues highlighted several dominant themes:

Bodily integrity and informed consent

Commissioners repeatedly heard from women living with HIV whose rights around bodily integrity and informed consent are being violated. Women around the world reported that they had been told:

• they should abort their pregnancies
• doctors would not deliver their babies
• they could not adopt children
• they could not provide foster care for children
• they must sign a document promising they would never have children
• they must prove they were HIV-negative in order to get married
• doctors would not operate on them
• they should be sterilized
• they must present documentation of their sterilization before they could have a job

In fact, many women living with HIV were forcibly sterilized. Cases of widespread forced or coerced sterilization of HIV-positive women have now been documented in many countries, including Chile, Namibia, South Africa, United States, Uzbekistan, and Swaziland. Women reported that they were forcibly sterilized without giving informed consent, and some reported that their husbands then abandoned them because they could not have children. Their forced sterilizations — traumatic enough — were compounded by societal gender roles and expectations.

Individual women’s reports captured the anguish of being HIV positive and pregnant:

• “It is my body, yet I did not get the information I was entitled to. They treated me like I didn’t own my own body” — woman from Sri Lanka

• “My primary care doctor looked at me like I was sick for even thinking of becoming pregnant. I just felt that the consensus was that I should not, that I was selfish and irresponsible for even thinking about it” — woman from United States

• “Throughout my pregnancy I was very, very sick. I got admitted several times, my CD4 count was very low and my viral load was high. Every visit to my doctor was a nightmare because my doctor would always remind me of how disappointed in me he was.” — woman from Swaziland

Forced Sterilization in Uzbekistan

The Global Commission’s Technical Advisory Group reports that: “In 2011, hundreds of reports emerged from Uzbekistan concerning forced sterilization of women, primarily targeting low income women, women with HIV, tuberculosis, drug dependence or other conditions. Instruments used for the procedure are often not sterile, which puts women at increased risk.”

What will the Global Commission on HIV and the Law say?

The Commission’s final report will be released in the first half of 2012.

AIDS-Free World says:

Forced sterilization — a horrific, irreparable violation of a woman’s right to sexual and reproductive autonomy, to dignity, to have a family, to informed consent, to non-discrimination — is just the end of a long line of violations women face when seeking HIV prevention and treatment. Again and again, women are denied agency, choice, and the information they need to protect their own health. Paternalistic policies are often focused on the health of infants while neglecting the health of mothers, and leave women uninformed and at risk.

In many countries, pregnant women living with HIV are given single-dose nevirapine to prevent transmission of the virus to their babies, yet they are not informed of the risk nevirapine can cause to their own health by creating resistance to HIV drugs. Information given on infant feeding for HIV-positive mothers is frequently incorrect or contradictory, leading to confusion and unnecessary risk. Recently publicized data suggests women using injectable contraception may be at twice the risk of acquiring or transmitting HIV, yet no information has been shared with women at a community level about the best precautions to take. Until women are given the information, dignity, respect, and choice that they need and deserve, the pandemic will not cease.

Criminalization of HIV transmission: The Impact on Women

Countries throughout the world continue to criminalize HIV transmission or exposure. Prosecutions against people living with HIV are currently the highest in Western Europe and North America, and over 20 African countries have introduced laws criminalizing HIV transmission and exposure in the last decade.⁴

The emergence of these laws was the subject of debate throughout the Regional Dialogues of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law.

Some of the testimony offered arguments for the criminalization of HIV transmission:

• Fear of malicious, intentional HIV transmission: Ministers of Parliament attending the Africa Regional Dialogue reported that they felt pressure from the public to address this. The public wanted to feel safe from those who may intentionally spread the virus.
• Some argued that the criminalization of HIV transmission could protect women -- if women are unable to negotiate safe sex in their marriages or relationships, the law protects them by making their husbands criminally liable for infecting them.

Other submissions and testimony from the Regional Dialogues made arguments against criminalization of HIV transmission — and specifically why it is bad for women:

• Women are often the first to learn their HIV-status because of testing at prenatal centers. Yet many remain afraid to disclose their status because disclosure may subject them to abuse from husbands or relatives — HIV-positive women are ten times more likely to experience violence and abuse than women who are HIV-negative. Their knowledge of their status and their inability to disclose leaves them susceptible to prosecution for transmission of HIV to their husbands.

“In most of the cases women in monogamous relationships get the infection from their husbands – the bread winners of the family. She is usually an illiterate, unskilled housewife left to care for her children and ensure the wellbeing of the family. They are denied property rights and most of the times their basic rights of food, shelter and access to medical support are violated due to the prevailing stigma in our society. On top of all this women are always left behind to bear the blame of giving infection to their husband.” — submission from NGO in Delhi, India

• Marital rape complicates the criminalization of HIV transmission. An activist from Malawi asked, “how are women expected to negotiate safer sex if they are refused the power to negotiate the very act of sex?”
• Cultural practices can place women in impossible positions with regards to HIV transmission. Lawyers from Kenya reported that the practice of wife inheritance — traditionally used to provide economic security for widows – is now being abused, and the “inheritance” of widows by their husbands’ brothers is used as a pre-condition for the widows to remain on their marital property. Faced with the choice of being “inherited” or being evicted and homeless, many widows are forced to choose inheritance. Yet art of this “inheritance” requires the widow to have unprotected sex with her new husband — if she is HIV-positive already she becomes susceptible to prosecution for infecting her new husband.
• Kenya’s law criminalizing HIV transmission does not require intent; women now fear being prosecuted for giving birth or for breastfeeding their babies.
• Activists expressed fear that the criminalization of HIV transmission will result in the targeting of sex workers, who are often treated merely as vectors of the virus.

What will the Global Commission on HIV and the Law say?

The Commission’s final report will be released in the first half of 2012.

AIDS-Free World Says:

Laws criminalizing HIV transmission and exposure, already problematic for the overall population, cannot be untangled from the context within which they exist — a context of pervasive and toxic gender discrimination where women frequently experience violence and blame if they disclose their HIV-positive status. The combination of gender discrimination and criminalization laws is deadly for women, rendering them especially vulnerable to targeting and prosecution by the State.

Sexual violence

More than 2.6 billion women live in countries where marital rape has not been explicitly criminalized. Throughout the Regional Dialogues women urged their government representatives to put these laws in place, and pushed the Global Commissioners to take a strong stance on the issue. A woman from Malawi testified that, “the criminalization of marital rape will allow women to be seen equally under the law and will allow for a needed change in the social perception of women. It will give Malawian women the legal rights to their own bodies.”

Even where marital rape is outlawed, lawyers and activists conveyed a dismal record of enforcement and prosecution:

• A Minister of Parliament from Zimbabwe reported that there have been no prosecutions of marital rape in her country because the Attorney General has to give his personal consent before the crime is prosecuted.

“In the displacement following the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, a 28-year old woman was gang-raped by a group of looters…A few months after the rape, she began to feel ill, and discovered she was pregnant and then that she was HIV-positive. Her husband abandoned her and her twin sons.” — submission from Pakistan

• The leading human rights organization in Botswana, BONELA, said that Botswana’s Parliamentarians removed the country’s martial rape law in 2008.
• In Nepal someone guilty of rape receives a minimum sentence of 5 years; someone guilty of marital rape will only be sentenced to 3 to 6 months of imprisonment.

Within a context of HIV, a lack of protection against marital rape is incredibly dangerous for women, who are often infected by their husbands and then abused or abandoned after disclosure of their HIV status. HIV then becomes both a cause and consequence of the violence perpetrated against women throughout the world.

What will the Global Commission on HIV and the Law say?

The Commission’s final report, with recommendations on marital rape, will be released in the first half of 2012.

AIDS-Free World Says:

The appalling fact that marital rape is still condoned around the world indicates that women are still considered to be the property of men.

Property and inheritance laws

Activists from African and Asian countries testified about laws and practices that deprive women of land and inheritance rights:

• In Botswana, under customary law only men are permitted to inherit from a parent’s estate.
• In Malawi, at the time of divorce a woman must show monetary contribution to the marital property in order to claim her share of it.
• In Kenya, women have a statutory right to own property yet many traditional male leaders and government officials do not believe women should own property, and make it difficult for women to claim their rights.
• Nigerian activists reported that HIV-positive women were simply told that they didn’t need to inherit property because “they were going to die soon.”

What will the Global Commission on HIV and the Law say?

The Commission’s final report will be released in the first half of 2012.

AIDS-Free World Says:

Yet again, HIV sheds light on the underlying systems of misogyny that are at the root of the pandemic. Property laws that make women economically dependent on their husbands, and unable to negotiate safer sex within their marriages, must be overturned. Inheritance laws that leave widows homeless, forcing them into impoverished lives in urban areas and placing them at a higher risk of rape and disease, must be overturned. To end AIDS, we must end the oppression of women.

1 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and World Health Organization (2009) Epidemic Update: http://data.unaids.org/pub/Report/2009/JC1700_Epi_Update_2009_en.pdf

2 "Women, HIV and AIDS": http://www.avert.org/women-hiv-aids.htm.

3 Submission to the Global Commission on HIV and the Law from the National Association of People with AIDS, USA.

4 The Global Criminalisation Scan Report 2010, produced by the Global Network of People Living with HIV: http://www.gnpplus.net/programmes/human-rights/global-criminalisation-scan/1648-2010-global-criminalisation-scan-report

See our introduction to the Global HIV Commission and the Law here.

Global Commission on HIV and the Law

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:59:00 -0500

Purpose

Who serves on the Commission?

The Global Commission on HIV and the Law is an independent body with three complementary components:

(1) High-level Commissioners: 15 eminent persons from all over the world were selected to serve as Commissioners, including AIDS-Free World Co-Director Stephen Lewis.

(2) Technical Advisory Group: 23 experts in law, public health, human rights, and HIV support the Commissioners by formulating and analyzing the evidence base on these issues.

(3) Regional Dialogues: Over 1000 submissions were sent to the Commission from groups of people living with HIV, from lawyers and activists and grassroots organizations, from those negatively affected by laws and seeking to make change through the legal system. First-hand testimony from these individuals was given over the course of seven regional dialogues held in Asia-Pacific, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. Activists presented their concerns to both the Commissioners and to the government representatives from their region invited to attend the dialogues.

Why law?

Law intersects with HIV in critical ways. Law can be used to protect and advance the human rights of people living with HIV. Anti-discrimination laws can protect employment and housing rights, keep children free from HIV-discrimination in schools or ensure the rights of prisoners to HIV prevention services. Confidentiality laws encourage HIV testing and treatment. Laws protecting women’s property and inheritance rights reduce their economic dependence and their vulnerability to HIV. The criminalization and prosecution of all forms of sexual violence can keep women safe and prevent them from being infected with HIV by a rapist.

Laws can also be harmful, and worsen the reach and the impact of the epidemic. Laws criminalizing sex workers, men who have sex with men, or injecting drug users fuel stigma and discrimination against these populations, which then drives the spread of HIV. Laws passed in reactive fear of HIV, such as those criminalizing the transmission of HIV, are dangerous and need to be better understood and addressed. Intellectual property laws and patent laws can drastically impede access to HIV treatment around the world.

The Global Commission on HIV and the Law recognized from the outset the important fact that law alone is not sufficient. They have thus devoted their attention and analysis to both law and to law enforcement – to law on the books, but also the ways in which law is practiced on the streets by police, in hospitals, by judges, or in the workplace by employers.

The Commission’s Four Areas of Focus

(1) Laws and practices that effectively criminalize people living with HIV and vulnerable to HIV

(2) Laws and practices that mitigate or sustain violence and discrimination as lived by women

(3) Laws and practices that facilitate or impede HIV-related treatment access

(4) Issues of law and HIV pertaining to children

Why another Commission? What impact will this Commission have?

The 15 Global Commissioners have promised the hundreds of activists who participated that this will not be another UN report to sit on office shelves, or another set of recommendations that are released and then ignored. The initial outcomes of the Commission will have three formats:

The final report of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, to be released in the first half of 2012, promises to include urgent, pressing recommendations for individual governments, law and policy-makers, civil society, lawyers and judges, United Nations bodies, and regional and international communities. The analysis and recommendations will be informed by scientific evidence, testimony from the regional dialogues and submissions, and the expertise of the Technical Advisory Group and the Commissioners themselves.

The Commission will provide specific road maps for ten countries to immediately begin improving their legal environments and better protecting the human rights of people living with and vulnerable to HIV.

Individual members have and will continue to use their status as global leaders and their role on this Commission to advocate at a high level for much stronger human rights protections and improvements to the legal response to HIV. For example:

• Commissioner Stephen Lewis gave a speech in Moscow at the International Forum on MDG 6 in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, addressing the severe violations against injecting drug users in the region.

• Commissioner Lewis wrote the foreword to the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network’s report on HIV and the Law in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

• Commissioner and former President of Botswana, Festus Mogae, publicly called for Botswana to decriminalize homosexuality and prostitution in order to prevent the spread of HIV.

• Michael Kirby, Commissioner and former Judge of the High Court of Australia, published an Op-Ed on ending the sexual apartheid in Commonwealth countries that is driving the spread of HIV.

Keynote Speech at the International Research Symposium on Equitable Health Services for People with Disabilities

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:22:00 -0500

Closing keynote address at International Research Symposium: Equitable Health Services for People with Disabilities with a Focus on Low- and Middle-Income Countries, co-organized by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

I am grateful to the LSHTM, the WHO, and all of you here today, for this opportunity to speak with you today.

I hope to use this privileged position of speaking at the end of the day without powerpoint, graphs, or charts, to take a step back and reflect not so much on what we’re doing—which has taken up much of our day—but rather on why we do what we do.

I have spent five years working on disability rights issues in the field of HIV/AIDS as well as other projects related to disability rights in international development projects and, most recently as you just heard, humanitarian interventions... I feel extremely fortunate to be working in this field at such an exciting time. As an intern with Disabled Peoples International in 2005 I was translating daily press briefings from the negotiations towards the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and three years later as Advisor on Disability with AIDS-Free World I celebrated the entry into force of the Convention and immediately began using it as a tool for our advocacy work calling for greater inclusion of people with disabilities in AIDS discourse, policy and programming. By 2009, I was invited to speak at the launch of the UNAIDS Policy Brief on AIDS and Disability. It was actually during this same visit to Geneva that I first met Alana and Tom and was briefed on the upcoming World Report, and two years later I have a copy on my desk at the LSHTM. It is important, I think, to remember and celebrate all of these major accomplishments that have been achieved in a relatively short period of time. It is truly exciting. But in this excitement of being in the midst of a rapidly expanding field I think we feel we don’t have the time—or we don’t take the time—to consider the underlying motivations for our work. To remember what brought us here. Why do we do what we do? What do we want to be doing and how? Not just patting our backs about what we’ve already done (though, of course that’s nice to do too...).

So, I would like us to stop and momentarily consider why are we here today? What different factors have brought each of us here? Why have you been sitting through a day of discussions about disability and people with disabilities and access to health services? Why do you care? Why bother to talk about disability in particular when there are so many needs out there?

The answers in this room will be many: Perhaps you have been working in the field for decades, perhaps this is the first time you’re exposed to the issues. Perhaps you were required to attend because of your work or studies. There are no wrong answers to this questions.

But, actually, before I go any further I would like you to turn to the person sitting beside you and ask them how they first came to the field of disability and health—whether the first exposure was today or 10 or 20 years ago. I know this is not a conventional exercise during a keynote address but, please, go ahead—just two minutes.

Thank you.

I hope that you learned something that you didn’t know before, even if you’re sitting beside a colleague you see every day.

We have spent this day together discussing aspects of building equitable health services, and through several presentations today we’ve seen that it’s not only about treating the “right people” and ensuring our quotas are met but also to tackle systemic issues impeding access.

(Though, of course, gathering data about who accesses our services and how that compares to who we expect to be treating is also important).

I want us to challenge ourselves to think beyond quotas and ticky-boxes on equal opportunity forms. We need to look at the social systems putting up barriers and how, through the virtue of our gendered or racialized or other privileged positions, we reinforce certain barriers. I think that, given the tremendous gains we have seen on the international disability “scene” over the past decade, we are at a point where we can stop and reflect.

In order to try and give you an idea of why I believe this is important, I’d like to tell you a part of my own story of how I have come to work on disability issues and access health services.

Yes, I was born with most of my joints dislocated, spent the majority of my first four years in hospital, started walking when I was seven and used a wheelchair for long-distances until I was 20. But I was lucky to be born in Canada with accessible medical and surgical services and to parents who treated me just as anyone else and fought to get me enrolled in my local neighborhood school when I turned six. Now it seems unbelievable to me, but they were put under a lot of pressure to keep me at a segregated school, but my parents are unbelievably and gorgeously determined and I remained in mainstream schooling throughout my education.

From a young age, my sisters and I were raised to consider the privileges we enjoyed growing up, and in many ways grew to appreciate all the benefits we derived from a good education, enough to eat and a comfortable home, but also to work towards challenging the systems that kept some people better off than others.

Yet, despite the appreciation instilled in me of my Canadian context, I grew up despising physiotherapy appointments and annual x-ray appointments. I didn’t like to be singled out. Being told what to do, being expected to conform to the demands of clinical professionals. My aunt gave me a Sesame Street T-shirt with Oscar the Grouch on it saying “everyone has a right to be a grouch” I wore deliberately to medical appointments. I enjoyed swimming and weekly ballet lessons; I did not feel it necessary to sit alone in some room doing some exercise or other.

Some years later, while already in University, I agreed to have a few occupational students “shadow me” in University as they were meant to “meet a disabled person and learn about their daily life.” They seemed a bit disappointed during their meeting. They admitted that, well, I was just another student like them. Why should this be surprising? Because they expected all their subjects to be hospital patients?

I guess that in some ways my critique of rehabilitation services was only possible due to my privileged access to health services as a Canadian, but also, it made me think that our access can lull us into a false sense of security. It can obscure the social factors of disability—the ways that people’s attitudes disable or enable us. Especially as children growing up with visible disabilities. Having surgery can help us to fit our foot into a shoe, or to be able to sit up better, but it does not make us necessarily accepted as “normal.”

In any case, I played wheelchair sports, got quite good at cross-country sit-skiing in long Canadian winters. And thanks to the regular interactions with fellow athletes with disabilities, I did see my experience of disability as part of a larger phenomenon, rather than just an individual physical frustration but I was adamant about the fact that just because I have lived experience with a disability didn’t mean that I had to take that on as my social cause. Just as even if I identify as a feminist, as much as that pushes me to try to ensure that my work does not re-enforce sexist paradigms, I do not have to necessarily devote myself only to women’s issues.

With time, I could articulate this in terms of intersecting prejudices. After reading a book in my undergraduate years by Canadian scholar, Sherene Razak called “Looking White People in the Eye” I became more comfortable articulating how different prejudices, whether it’s racism or sexism or homophobia, feed off of each other. One can never truly be addressed without tackling another; but reading that book came a few years later and I’ve digressed from my story, sorry.

I began my University studies in the year 2000 at Queen’s University, in Canada. Having been raised with a strong sense of social justice, I appreciated the critical nature of the Development Studies program that I found there and combined this with my degree in Environmental Science due to my extensive involvement with environmental activism at the time. For my third year of studies, I had the opportunity to travel to Ghana for a full-year of study in Accra and Tamale. I was expecting—hoping—to explore questions around traditional healers, herbalists, traditional knowledge.

But in my first month there what shocked me was that the only people with disabilities I saw were begging on the street—it took me three weeks before I found a group of musicians practicing under a tree, one of which was disabled and so we started to chat. I was constantly being reminded of the visibility of my own disability when Ghanaians would walk by and comment “ah, look at that white girl! What happened to her legs!?” To be fair, the whole comment was said in Twi but I lived with two young girls who were very faithful translators and language instructors, so the comments didn’t escape me.

Questions about my positionality as a white, disabled person started forming in my head. I started asking more questions, finding out about treatment and attitudes. With time, I was brought to the Tamale Resource Centre for Persons with Disabilities, where I was introduced to Madam Mercy Apoe, a blind woman about my mother’s age who took me under her wing. She instilled in me the sense that, as an educated, relatively wealthy, disabled woman I not only had a role to play but I had the responsibility to speak out for the cause of women with disabilities, many of whom, due to poverty and prejudice, did not have the education and mobility that allowed for the voice that I could have.

I spent a lot of time at the Resource Centre, just chatting. Sharing stories. Talking about families, relationships, men, sex, marriage... This is why I stayed. I liked the gossip. Actually, seriously, probably the most common question I get asked across countries and contexts is about marriage and relationships. Not about funding or available surgeries.

Many of the people dropping into the center from nearby villages commented that I was the first “white disabled” that they ever saw. Now this is not so long ago; yes Tamale is not Accra and is quite rural, but still it surprised me and made me stop and think. How many of our young student volunteers, interns, and others conform to the expected image of wealthy foreigner: usually white, probably blonde, and not disabled.

So during my time in Tamale people took the opportunity to ask me about my own experience of relationships, and also education, and childcare and a whole range of really down-to-earth topics. I was inspired and excited by the way they framed their issues as a social struggle, as a question of challenging assumptions and pushing for inclusion in social and political systems—regardless of how they walked or talked. I was refreshed by the diversity of bodies and ways of moving around that I was surrounded by in the resource center. I was inspired by peoples perspective on the issues and humbled by the fact that they were asking me to be an ally in their struggle. They invited me to take part.

That is how I got onto the path I am now.

Positionality IS important. But it is not about essentializing someone’s experience based on their label. My sister, Anastasia, is at times a much stronger disability advocate than I am! She has grown up with me and our youngest sister, who has a neurodegenerative condition and requires constant care, and Anastasia is often more ready to be vocal about our rights to access this or that or to challenge peoples offensive behavior than I am. She is as involved in shifting societal perspectives of who does and doesn’t belong.

I bring up this point because I think that often we want to quickly put people in boxes of who does and doesn’t belong here or there. Within the disability movement we’re starting to talk about the need to dismantle “hierarchy of disability.” In other words, prioritizing some people’s voice by virtue of their disability. I think this is unhelpful, dangerous even, as we draw divisions rather than cultivating alliances. And that can happen both within and outside of the disability movement.

A while back when I was chatting with Prof. Nora Groce, who’s guidance I have been grateful for since the earliest days of my career, but when Nora and I were speaking a few months ago, I remember Nora marveling at how many meetings she has attended of mental health activists who were saying “Yes, we may have some problems but we’re not stupid...” and then soon after she’d find herself in a meeting of people with learning disabilities and they’d say “Sure, we may have trouble understanding things sometimes but we’re not crazy...” Where does that leave us?

Sometimes even within the disability movement we try to determine who does and doesn’t belong rather than valuing different experience. Of course, we must be wary of thinking that a caregiver's perspective is the same as, or a proxy for, that of a person with a disability. But, then again, these categories are definitely not as rigid as we may like them to be either. In certain times and places I also find myself as a primary caregiver just as much as a disabled person myself. Just as I am simultaneously a disabled person and a researcher.

I remember once being toured around a new hospital site where the managers were very proud of the fact that the clinic was entirely accessible: space between beds, accessible toilets, everything. But then we had to climb up the stairs to get to the office. The management area of the hospital was not accessible at all. No one ever imagined that managers or clinicians would ever need a lift or accessible toilets!

In some ways that is what critical feminist disability scholarship gets to...it challenges the binaries of us and them, disabled/non-disabled, carer and cared for. We can be both oppressed and oppressors in different situations.

The more integrated schools we have, the more professionals and politicians with disabilities we see, the more our movement will grow. Not because disabled people will intrinsically be better at their studies or at their jobs but because we would all be more and more exposed to different ways of communicating and interacting with difference, and that in turn enhances our openness and inclusivity in our social and professional interactions.

Sadly, it’s impossible to prescribe a universally applicable way of ensuring access or true inclusion. Disability is too multifarious, too historically, culturally and contextually contingent to permit a cookie-cutter approach. A clear set of 10-steps for accessibility isn’t realistic to ensure access because inaccessibility and exclusion are based on deeply entrenched notions of normality that we have grown up with. This needs to be challenged in order to dismantle barriers to access.

This large scope may seem very disheartening, and it does seem like an insurmountable task on one hand, but very exciting on another because we each have a part to play: medical doctors and physiotherapists, yes, but also teachers and lawyers, shop-owners and parents.

And because each one of us plays a part in it, it is also important to reflect on our participation—our complacency in the system and what opportunities we have to change it.

One of my favorite projects to talk about as a positive example is LVCT in Kenya. LVCT had been running mainstream voluntary HIV counseling and testing services for several years when it decided to address the gap in services available to Deaf people. So they trained Deaf people as VCT counselors and employed them in Deaf VCT clinics in Nairobi, Kisumu, and Mombassa. The programs were so well received and so successful that soon people with different disabilities who were hearing started coming to the clinic, and LVCT had to hire interpreters to translate from the Deaf interpreters to the hearing clients. It was an unexpected but fantastic inversion of the norm but at the same time as it challenged perceptions, the project was also delivering solid services, and the Deaf program has since expanded into a larger disability VCT project.

Our consideration of equitable access through a lens of disability gives us the tremendous opportunity to challenge the way we see our patients, our clinics, or professional and personal roles. Considering disability as a person's social and physical reality—a reality that anyone of us can experience at any point in time due to an injury, illness, or trick of genetics—gives us the impetus to challenge our way of perceiving others and of building systems and structures to welcome a whole variety of people and bodies that do not conform to the unrealistic expectations that all our bodies are of a strong, white, heterosexual man.

Working towards accessible services will enhance access for people far beyond those we currently perceive as disabled. It will help open up our offices, clinics and services to single parents with young children, elderly people, caregivers requiring more flexible work hours....and many more people who may currently find it difficult to “conform” to what is perceived as normal.

It is one more strand in the many elements that feed into inclusive communities and community structures, including health services.

I think that still, too often, our minds jump to the specialized services—such as orthopedic surgery and/or physiotherapy that people with certain disabilities may require. And as true and real as these concerns are, we also heard today from our colleagues whose work highlights the barriers that people with disabilities may face is accessing primary health care. Are babies born with congenital impairments accessing childhood immunizations at the same rate as children not diagnosed with any impairments?

I conducted a series of 100 interviews with women with disabilities in Uganda and Canada from late 2008–2009 asking about their experiences with sexual and reproductive health care services. I expected... but I found that the experience with the health care worker was just as likely to be positive as it was to be negative. We heard from Tom this morning that empirical evidence shows that actually women do face greater chance of mistreatment at the hands of healthcare workers than non-disabled women, but at the time it was a 50/50 chance in both countries. But what was much more likely to discourage them was a lack of transportation options to arrive at the clinic and discriminatory comments from people in their home-village or in the queue at the clinic itself, questioning why they should need to attend an HIV test center or to attend pre-natal care. I remember hearing a story from one woman using a wheelchair who had no one to accompany her to the health center when she was about to give birth, so someone’s brother who was around at the time accompanied her. He faced so many derogatory comments while sitting in the waiting room: “ei, you, how could you do that to her? Isn’t her life difficult enough?” Not knowing, first of all, that he was the father but, secondly, never considering once that that woman may have in fact wanted to have that child and that that could be a positive experience for her!

I remember another story from a disabled woman who had to spend a few days in hospital after giving birth and the nurses warned that she won’t be able to cope. That she’ll struggle to cope at home when she couldn’t even get in and out of her hospital bed with her new baby. She had to try to explain over and over again that at home everything would be fine—things were set up for her, the counters were lower, her bed was at the right height and in the right position—that she knew she would not encounter the daily frustrations she faced at the hospital.

Although in these stories the people did manage to access the health services, they still highlight the role of attitudes and perception and that ensuring equitable access to health care services is about so much more than just ramps or Braille.

So much exclusion and discouragement happens long before someone makes it to the front doors of a health care center.

It is crucially important that we don’t assume that we know too quickly the needs of others. We need to listen to people's experiences. This is why individuals with disabilities and Disabled Peoples Organizations need to be part of the process of planning and implementing services. We have committed to this on paper, but how often is this actually happening?

I think that in our policy documents we’ve achieved this goal. Just as on paper we have committed to including disabled people in our work, we have committed to cross-sectoral collaboration: working in partnership with organizations on the ground, valuing the experiences of activists and program staff.

Thanks to gatherings such as today, we have the chance to take advantage of opportunities arising from different research methodologies, different ways of acquiring and presenting information and knowledge.

Thankfully we see this pattern developing in various contexts.

I have presented papers at four International AIDS Conferences of the past six years and I have seen the ways in which people living with AIDS are able to sit side-by-side with microbiologists in the plenary session and present their own experiences of setting up community-based programs, establishing relationships with scientists and researchers. The synergy between perspectives of users, policy makers, and scientists are increasingly respected.

This is not to devalue scientific knowledge but to value the different knowledge that is derived from different kinds of experiences and using this to deepen and strengthen—rather than to weaken and dilute—our work.

Attitude towards knowledge affects how we use knowledge.

But true interdisciplinarity does not come just from hiring an anthropologist to join a team of epidemiologists or making sure that a few statistics are thrown into a series of case-studies.

Just as including disabled people and disabled peoples organizations (or DPOs) should not be done as simply a token gesture.

Yes, it can be difficult to work with DPOs. Collaborating with many community-based organizations in low-resources settings across geographical, linguistic, technological and cultural barriers can be extremely frustrating. I have heard DPOs in the Caribbean referred to as “very weak partners,” and had first-hand experience with organizations in Africa mismanaging grants completely, where their funding had to be withdrawn because it was simply being “eaten,” so to speak.

Yet, before we write-off collaboration entirely, or before we agree to work with dysfunctional organizations at an arms-length simply to satisfy inclusion criteria, we should be looking at the underlying causes of these organizational weaknesses: lack of resources; lack of experience amongst staff; grants, money coming in chunks too large with time-lines too tight. Could we embed more shadowing? More training opportunities and partnerships within the projects we are funding or proposing to be funded? What about facilitating partnerships between disabled peoples organizations and other social movements and civil society organizations within the home city or community that our potential partner is engaged in? How can the capacity of these weaker organizations be built up in the course of the project?

When I was working in South Africa, although I was based at DPSA I worked closely with colleagues at the Treatment Action Campaign that some of you may be familiar with. Colleagues from TAC were not very familiar with the needs of disabled people. They did have some members with disabilities but it was not, at the time, by conscious effort. In fact, the first time a friend at TAC was called to facilitate a two-week training of trainers with a group of youth with disabilities from the townships, he complained to his friends about how boring the coming fortnight was going to be—he was about to spend it with a bunch of disabled kids, after all. But after two weeks of running the workshop, his eyes had been opened up to disability issues just as much as the eyes of the participants were opened to HIV issues. He subsequently invited these and other youth with disabilities to each training, party, and radio program he was involved with through TAC because he was suddenly aware of the systemic exclusion these young people were facing for no good reason.

We need more of this. This was not an expert coming in and teaching. It was more about listening, creating links, and enabling reciprocal exchange of info and expertise.

We need to reflect upon, recognize and take advantage of the strength of others. This can seem to lead to a trite statement about “everyone’s abilities vs. disability,” but I don’t mean it like that. Rather, I think that this can extend our conversation into a consideration of the multi-disciplinarity we see in this room today and how, as much as it can be difficult to work with people molded in different paradigms, we can also celebrate the multi-disciplinarity in this room and try to approach other ways of knowing and gaining knowledge as a strength rather than something to be measured out and placed on an epistemological hierarchy.

This includes activists appreciating the time and, yes, money that it takes to produce rigorous research, and to appreciate the immense benefits that they can derive from having robust data at their disposal after months or years of intensive research by qualified researchers. I think that in the NGO world we’re not always good at appreciating this.

Yes, we must certainly do our best to ensure that there are ramps and facilities to accommodate people with various impairments in our health care centers, educational institutions, and so on. But at the risk of sounding very cliché, I do believe that accessibility really is first and foremost a question of attitudes. Parents attitudes, extended family, teachers, bosses. Yes, legislation is important as is the UN Convention. But it is a tool. Only as useful as its masters, so to speak. It is up to people to use the legislative and other tools to affect change.

As I mentioned before, I don’t think that there is a cookie-cutter approach. If there was, all of our jobs would be much easier! We’d just need to get the WHO to publish our 10-steps of disability inclusion and we’d be set.

But in my experience so much of access has to do with individuals. With communities. Yes, with laws and structures, but with the acting-out of them.

Disability teaches us that our bodies are diverse, that we interact in our environments in different ways. I truly believe that if we are open, creative, and genuinely fascinated and appreciative of this diversity then that will enable all of us to live healthier lives—which includes getting access to the health services we all need.

Lewis Calls for an End to the Medieval Treatment of People Who Use Drugs

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 12:43:00 -0500

A new report by the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network, with a foreword by AIDS-Free World Co-Director Stephen Lewis, reveals the brutal human rights violations against drug users and calls on governments to implement humane drug policies and promote effective responses to the HIV epidemic. The report presents results from the monitoring of human rights violations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and offers recommendations on how to improve the access of drug users to HIV prevention and care.

The foreword by Lewis is below. The full report, titled ‘HIV and the Law in Eastern Europe and Central Asia,’ can be accessed here (PDF, 315KB).

To read this report is to drown in a tsunami of rage. The behavior of the governments of Eastern Europe and Central Asia towards people who use drugs — and there is not a single country without some degree of culpability — is both brutal and diabolical. I can scarcely believe what these pages yield. It is as though we were thrown back to medieval times when agony on the rack was the punishment for the most trifling of so-called crimes.

But in contemporary terms it’s much worse. The testaments in this monograph flow from people struggling desperately with illness — not crimes by any sane definition — but illness that has been criminalized with malicious intent. It is to weep. What in God’s name is wrong with governments that they should so savage basic human rights?

Conventional wisdom says that societies should be judged by the way in which they treat the most disadvantaged in their midst. If that is so, the AIDS pandemic has given us much by which to judge our societies and the policies and laws that are the expressions of our collective values. From its beginnings, AIDS has represented a clear choice for governments — to use policy and law to protect those at high risk of contracting HIV or to fail to do so — or, even worse, to allow law and policy to be an additional burden to people already disadvantaged by discrimination and stigma.

Thirty years into the pandemic, we can report that some countries have struggled with and met this challenge in ways that do credit to their commitment to the rights and dignity of all people. Some countries have removed harsh and senseless criminal laws against homosexuality, perhaps sooner than would have been the case had AIDS not brought the situation of men who have sex with men to the policy foreground. These countries have learned the fundamental lesson that protecting the rights of those living with or at risk of HIV is also the most effective way to contain the epidemic.

It is unfortunately only a minority of countries that have made a commitment to legal protections of the rights of people who use drugs and have provided legal grounding for basic health services for them. It is apparently politically acceptable — even politically advantageous — that people who use drugs are allowed to suffer without basic health care, to be stripped of their dignity by repressive policing, and to die from preventable deaths. The heart-breaking accounts in this report from the real experiences of people who use drugs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia epitomize this scandal.

As I read these moving and maddening accounts, I am overwhelmed by how unnecessary is the suffering documented here. No one can claim ignorance of what works and doesn’t work when it comes to reducing HIV transmission linked to drug use and ensuring access to services for people who use drugs. The continued resistance of some governments to ensuring access to clean injection equipment and to evidence-based and humane treatment for drug dependence is beyond comprehension. It is nothing short of criminal that states enable police to interrogate people in a state of drug withdrawal, to arrest people for possession of a syringe, and to gain what is virtually a second income by extortion of people who possess small quantities of drugs.

My colleagues on the Global Commission on HIV and the Law and I have been in awe of those who have been courageous enough to step forward to tell us their stories. When societies condemn drug use as a moral failing and governments treat drug addiction as a high crime, it is no small thing for people who use drugs to recount publicly the experiences of their daily lives. This report itself is a testament to the initiative and courage of people who use drugs, and I am grateful to the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network for the work of compiling these exceptional stories.

There will be a tendency, on reading this report to be paralyzed by the despair that is inevitably felt in the face of such a compendium of abuse. Somehow, we must all in our own ways be advocates for the fundamental reforms that are desperately needed to ensure that laws and policies on illicit drug use become instruments of justice and human dignity.

Tomlinson Receives Kato Award

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:05:00 -0500

On December 10th, 2011, Maurice Tomlinson of AIDS-Free World was awarded the David Kato Voice and Vision Award. Inspired by David Kato's work, the award recognizes the leadership of individuals who strive to uphold the numerous dimensions of sexual rights for LGBTI people. Sexual rights are an evolving set of entitlements related to sexuality that contribute to the freedom, equality and dignity of all people, and are an important aspect of human rights. The realization of these rights is also an integral element to a meaningful HIV response among these marginalized groups.

From the Nomination
Maurice has worked to unite the major LGBTI and HIV/AIDS groups in Jamaica to challenge homophobia, but he also has demonstrated leadership in forging new alliances. He has reached out to groups in Jamaica representing sex workers and youth, and he also has worked very hard to include the chief mainstream human rights organizations on the island.

In a country where homophobia is violent and relentless, Maurice has become a known face and voice in support of sexual minority rights. This is a dangerous project. Maurice has received at least one death threat and has been recognized and jeered at on the streets of Kingston and Montego Bay. He regularly appears on television and radio to promote homosexual rights. He writes letters to the editor to all the major Jamaica newspapers, and as a result, his name has become notorious. He recognizes that a movement, to be effective, cannot be faceless, and he is willing to risk his security to build that movement.

As a lawyer, it would have been easy for Maurice simply to bring a legal action challenging the Jamaican anti-sodomy law. Instead, he took a more thoughtful approach, recognizing that the groundwork had to be laid for a public dialogue about LGBTI rights before a legal judgment (if successfully obtained) could be implemented. He developed an integrated approach to advocacy, combining high-level persuasion (meeting with government and elected and UN officials), public education (starting the first-ever “Stands for Tolerance,” public actions in which citizens stand on busy street corners holding signs promoting human rights), media work, documentation of abuses, capacity-building for members of the LGBTI community to understand their rights, and litigation. This approach has been strategic and effective. Government officials have privately confessed to him that they realize the law must change if Jamaica is to keep pace globally. Church officials (a few) have confided that they understand LGBTI rights are human rights. Maurice is no longer the lone voice writing letters to the editor in support of LGBTI rights; other Jamaicans are doing it too. This is evidence of the impact of his work.

Maurice also has recognized the importance of linking Jamaica’s indigenous LGBTI movement to the struggles of others. He has served as a resource and inspiration to Caribbean activists who have sought Maurice’s counsel and help in developing similar integrated campaigns for their own countries. He has met with officials from other CARICOM countries about the need to eliminate homophobia and homophobic laws across the region. He also has endeavored to link his advocacy to movements outside the Caribbean, and has spoken at conferences in Africa, Europe, and North America. Finally, he has lobbied officials globally, particularly from other Commonwealth countries, to demand that LGBTI rights be protected, respected, and fulfilled.

About Maurice
Maurice Tomlinson has been involved in HIV and AIDS and LGBTI activism in Jamaica for over twelve years. He first realized the importance of work challenging LGBTI discrimination through his own lived experience, when he was a flight attendant for a major airline in Jamaica. His supervisor told him that he needed to act more “masculine,” as his voice and mannerisms were off-putting to customers. His personal experience of sexual orientation discrimination, combined with a raging AIDS pandemic, made Maurice realize the disease could affect anyone, but particularly those who were oppressed and driven underground because of their sexuality.

Maurice subsequently went to law school, where he realized that discrimination against sexual minorities is not a given, and can be challenged with the right tools. After he obtained his law license, he initially practiced in the corporate realm, focused on intellectual property issues. However, he found himself increasingly drawn to LGBTI activism. He began to volunteer at Jamaica’s premiere LGBTI advocacy organization, Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG), where he served on the board of directors. He also began to undertake pro bono work for Caribbean Vulnerable Communities (CVC), looking at a possible legal challenge to Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law. In March 2010, Maurice began working with AIDS-Free World as legal advisor on marginalized groups. He is also a lecturer-at-law at the University of Technology, Jamaica, where he has instituted a new class in international human rights law.

Disability Takes Center Stage at the ICASA Conference: Launch of Important New Resource for the Inclusion of Disabled People

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:08:00 -0500

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia — AIDS-Free World, in collaboration with an international group of activists, academics and disabled people, is pleased to announce the launch of a new publication entitled a “Framework for Inclusion of Disability in National Strategic Plans on HIV & AIDS.”

Despite the mounting evidence on the interrelationship between disability and AIDS, disabled people have been largely excluded from national planning efforts on AIDS. A key factor in this work is the development of National Strategic Plans (NSPs), which invariably fail to address issues related to people with disabilities. We believe that the inclusion of disabled people in the NSP development process is a first step to adopting a human rights-based approach for disabled people based on principles of universal design and reasonable accommodation. The new framework presented in this publication represents the first concrete attempt to systemically introduce issues of disability, access and the human rights of disabled people into the process.

The launch of this valuable new tool took place at the ICASA conference on December 6, 2011. For your own copy of the new resource, click here (PDF, 205KB).

The First-Ever Legal Challenge to Jamaica's Anti-Gay Law

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:25:00 -0400

KINGSTON, JAMAICA, Oct. 26 — At a press conference in Kingston today, Jamaican attorney Maurice Tomlinson announced that his organization, AIDS-Free World, has presented a first-ever legal challenge to the country’s anti-gay laws. AIDS-Free World has filed a petition at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of two gay men whose names are being withheld to protect their safety. A legal team assembled by AIDS-Free World argues that by criminalizing homosexuality under its constitution, Jamaica is in violation of international human rights law. (See details about the legal case and Commission procedure in the attached Q&A.)

The so-called “anti-sodomy law” in Jamaica has cast a destructive pall over the lives of gay Jamaicans. It has fed a homophobic society in which gays and lesbians are harassed, mocked, vilified, beaten and killed simply because of their sexual orientation. Driven underground, many fear that seeking an HIV test will brand them as homosexual, and therefore criminal. The national prevalence of HIV is over 30 percent among men who have sex with men, compared to a rate of 1.6 percent in the general population. The petition establishes clear ties between the country’s active promotion of discrimination and its AIDS epidemic.

Tragically and unconscionably, the Government of Jamaica is determined to sustain its discriminatory legislation. The petition brought by AIDS-Free World makes clear that this law tramples on the American Convention on Human Rights, to which Jamaica is a party, and violates numerous guarantees contained in other international treaties that the country has signed and ratified. Jamaica’s law legitimizes abuses against homosexuals by state actors, including the police. It also encourages vigilante justice by private citizens, most of whom believe that the “anti-sodomy” law grants them permission to commit acts of violence against sexual minorities. Because the Government and its highest officials support and enable homophobia, the only possible way to end the persistent violation of the human rights of gay Jamaicans is to strike down the law as soon as possible and usher in an era of tolerance.

Because measures to reverse the homophobic legislation are unavailable within Jamaica, AIDS-Free World is bringing its challenge at the regional level, to the Inter-American Commission. If the Commission decides favorably, other countries in the region with similar anti-homosexuality legislation will be forced to take notice. In fact, it is the conviction of AIDS-Free World that a favorable outcome will have a dramatic impact on all countries that persist in the medieval persecution of their citizens on the grounds of sexual orientation.

There is great irony to the fact that the Jamaican legislation derives directly from the days of the British Empire. Despite being an independent country, Jamaica has not rid itself of the discriminatory shackles of colonialism. This is also true of some 40 other members of the Commonwealth of Nations, an association of countries once ruled by Great Britain. Hence, the issue of decriminalizing homosexuality is on the agenda of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting that begins in Australia in two days’ time.

Mr. Tomlinson is joined in representing the petitioners by Lord Anthony Gifford, noted counsel on a similar and successful case before the European Court of Human Rights, and a formidable legal team assembled by AIDS-Free World Legal Director Betsy Apple that includes pro bono attorneys from the US firm Thompson Hine and the Law Center at Nova Southeastern University.

###

Media Contact:
Christina Magill
TEL: +1-416-657-4458
clm@aidsfreeworld.org

Download the press release here (PDF, 137KB)

View the Q&A on AIDS-Free World's petition to the IACHR here

Q&A: AIDS-Free World's Challenge of Jamaica's Anti-Gay Law

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:49:00 -0400

AIDS-Free World has filed a legal petition at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights arguing that by criminalizing homosexuality under its constitution, Jamaica is in violation of international human rights law. View the press release about the IACHR petition here.

What Jamaica’s Anti-Sodomy Law Is And What It Does
1. Why does AIDS-Free World care about Jamaica?
2. What is Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law?
3. What punishment does the anti-sodomy law prescribe?
4. What does the anti-sodomy law have to do with homophobia in Jamaica?
5. What does the anti-sodomy law have to do with the fight against HIV and AIDS?

The Legal Challenge To The Anti-Sodomy Law
6. Why is AIDS-Free World challenging the Jamaican anti-sodomy law?
7. Why is AIDS-Free World challenging the anti-sodomy law NOW?
8. Where is AIDS-Free World challenging this law?
9. Why isn’t AIDS-Free World challenging this Jamaican law in Jamaican courts?
10. What is AIDS-Free World’s role in this legal challenge?
11. Who, exactly, are the Petitioners?
12. Why are the Petitioners’ names and identities kept secret?
13. What has AIDS-Free World done to help the Petitioners (besides representing them in this legal challenge)?
14. If the Petitioners fear for their safety, what has AIDS-Free World done to protect them?
15. What exactly is the IACHR authorized to do?
16. What is a “petition” filed at the IACHR?
17. On what basis are the Petitioners and AIDS-Free World challenging the Jamaican “anti-sodomy” law?
18. What is the American Convention on Human Rights?
19. What rights in the American Convention does Jamaica’s “anti-sodomy law” violate?
20. What is the ultimate goal of this legal challenge?
21. Is the Jamaican government obligated to listen to the IACHR?
22. If Jamaica is not obligated to listen to the Inter-American Commission, why not go to the Inter-American Court?
23. What, then, is the purpose of the IACHR petition, if it doesn’t result in a legally binding decision against the government of Jamaica?
24. What does this case mean for other countries in the Americas (and is the IACHR’s decision binding upon them)?
25. Why is this case important?

The IACHR Petition Process
26. How long does a petition take to be processed?
27. What is the process by which the IACHR decides upon a petition?
28. What will happen to the Petitioners in the meantime?
29. Whom do I contact for more information about this petition?

What Jamaica’s Anti-Sodomy Law Is And What It Does

1. Why does AIDS-Free World care about Jamaica?

Jamaica has the reputation as the most homophobic place on earth. Horrendous violations of the human rights of gay, lesbian, transgender, intersex, and other gender non-conforming Jamaicans have been documented, ranging from bullying to extortion to brutal attacks to home invasions to murder, and everything in between. The homophobia in Jamaica is palpable; every day, the average Jamaican might witness (or participate in) incidents where gay men are verbally or physically assaulted on the street. This homophobia also drives men who have sex with men (MSM) deep underground, away from effective HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment, care, and support interventions. The result is that the HIV prevalence rate amongst Jamaican MSM is about 32% as compared to a rate of 1.6% in the general population. That means that nearly one out of every three Jamaican males who has sex with men is HIV positive, a deeply shocking and completely unacceptable statistic that translates into a serious public health crisis.

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2. What is Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law?

Jamaica has a law that criminalizes consensual sexual conduct (actual or attempted) between men, as well as the “abominable crime of buggery” (anal sex) between any people of any sex. This law is called the “Offenses Against the Person Act,” and while it is a comprehensive law dealing with all sorts of crimes, three of its sections (76, 77, and 79) specifically make male homosexual sex and “buggery” illegal. This law has existed since 1864, when Jamaica was under British colonial law, and has endured since then despite the fact that Jamaica achieved independence in 1962.

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3. What punishment does the anti-sodomy law prescribe?

The law requires that anyone convicted of “buggery” will be sentenced to up to ten years of imprisonment with hard labor; those convicted of “attempted buggery” or “any indecent assault upon any male person” will be sentenced to up to seven years in prison, with or without hard labor; and any male who commits or tries to commit an “act of gross indecency” with another male will be sentenced to as much as two years in prison, with or without hard labor. While very few cases have been documented in which the police or prosecutors in Jamaica have tried to charge individuals with these crimes, so long as the law exists, so, too, does the possibility of prosecution. This means that homosexuals live in fear that anything two men do, no matter how unremarkable—such as sitting in a car talking, or going to the beach together—might be perceived as a violation of the anti-sodomy law, and possibly will subject them to criminal prosecution.

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4. What does the anti-sodomy law have to do with homophobia in Jamaica?

The law criminalizes three specific acts: “buggery,” “attempted buggery,” and “acts of gross indecency.” However, AIDS-Free World and many other organizations have documented the fact that politicians, elected officials, police officers, church leaders, and the average person on the street— members of the general population of Jamaica—universally understand the law to make homosexuality itself illegal. This means that the law effectively turns people into criminals if they are homosexual or are believed to be homosexual, or if they diverge in any way from commonly accepted notions of heterosexuality. Because under the law, anyone who performs or tries to perform a sexual act with a person of the same sex is a criminal, Jamaica’s law gives permission to people in the society at large to view homosexuals (actual or perceived) as criminals. Jamaica is a country in which vigilante justice against criminals is quite common. The anti-sodomy law encourages violence against homosexuals by essentially proclaiming, “these people are ‘unapprehended criminals,’ and therefore should be treated as such.”

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5. What does the anti-sodomy law have to do with the fight against HIV and AIDS?

Laws that directly or indirectly criminalize homosexual acts, homosexual identity, and men who have sex with men (MSM) form barriers to effective responses to HIV in the countries that retain those laws. The laws create apprehension amongst homosexuals and MSM, who fear that even the mundane activities of daily life will lead to accusations that they are involved in criminal acts. For example, if a gay male goes to the doctor for an annual health check-up, that doctor may ask him if he is sexually active. If he answers truthfully, he has just confessed to a crime. If he lies and says he is not sexually active, or says he has sex with women, he will be depriving the doctor of accurate information about risks to his health.

Laws that criminalize homosexuals and homosexuality drive underground people who are in need of health and other services related to HIV and AIDS, and who are at risk of contracting the virus. Because the anti-sodomy law is perceived to criminalize homosexuality as a whole, men who have sex with men are deeply unpopular in Jamaica, and the government is not anxious to be seen as providing “special” services to them. Consequently, the Jamaican government uses the anti-sodomy law as an excuse for not creating adequate HIV-related health programs (outreach, testing, support, treatment, care) that target MSM. This combination of governmental inaction and legitimate fear amongst MSM creates enormous barriers to effective HIV and AIDS health programs.

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The Legal Challenge To The Anti-Sodomy Law

6. Why is AIDS-Free World challenging the Jamaican anti-sodomy law?

AIDS-Free World’s mission is to challenge the laws, practices, programs, and actions (or inaction) that obstruct effective, comprehensive responses to the global HIV and AIDS pandemic. So long as the anti-sodomy law exists, a truly effective AIDS response in Jamaica will be impossible. The law, in essence, makes it legal to treat homosexuals and MSM as criminals. It makes Jamaica a hostile place for homosexuals and MSM, particularly those who seek any kind of health services. It drives underground homosexuals and MSM and prevents them from seeking critical HIV and AIDS prevention, testing, treatment, care, and support services. Jamaica is in the midst of an HIV crisis; 32% of all men who have sex with men are HIV positive. The anti-sodomy law makes it impossible to reach those people. Therefore, it must be changed.

AIDS-Free World, through its advocacy, seeks to address the underlying discrimination and injustice that enable HIV and AIDS to flourish. The Jamaican anti-sodomy law legalizes homophobic violence and discrimination against anyone in Jamaica who does not fit mainstream notions about sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Because the anti-sodomy law turns homosexuals into “unapprehended criminals,” the law enables people—government employees and private individuals alike—to commit human rights abuses against those who are homosexual or thought to be homosexual.

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7. Why is AIDS-Free World challenging the anti-sodomy law NOW?

It is impossible to challenge a law of this kind without evidence that the law is leading to abuses. AIDS-Free World has been collaborating with organizations in Jamaica to gather the evidence necessary to prove the link between the anti-sodomy law and violations of human rights. Jamaican groups and activists are leading a movement that seeks to challenge human rights violations against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) and MSM communities, but building movements takes time. AIDS-Free World also has been working with Jamaican organizations to document abuses against LGBT and MSM, and it has taken some time for these communities to feel safe enough to come forward and tell their stories.

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8. Where is AIDS-Free World challenging this law?

AIDS-Free World is challenging the anti-sodomy law before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), one of two institutions in the 35-country Americas region that exist to promote and protect human rights. (The other is the Inter-American Court on Human Rights.) The regional umbrella organization that brings together these 35 countries to discuss a wide range of issues, including democracy, human rights, security, and development, is called the Organization of American States (OAS). The IACHR and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights fall under the authority of the OAS. Their activities are focused on the human rights situation in the 35 countries that make up the Americas region. (More on the IACHR in question #15, below).

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9. Why isn’t AIDS-Free World challenging this Jamaican law in Jamaican courts?

The Jamaican constitution has a relatively unusual clause in it called the “savings law clause,” which protects Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law from being contested in Jamaican courts. When the new Jamaican Charter of Rights and Fundamental Freedoms was passed in April 2011, it contained a provision stating that any pre-existing laws relating to sexual offenses (such as the anti-sodomy law), pornography, or abortion were “saved” from constitutional review. This legal protection immunizes the anti-sodomy law from challenge in Jamaican courts, and made it impossible for AIDS-Free World to assist Jamaican lawyers to bring a case in Jamaica. Consequently, our only recourse for challenging the law was to go to the IACHR.

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10. What is AIDS-Free World’s role in this legal challenge?

As part of its broader efforts to abolish anti-gay laws that have survived from previous centuries in dozens of countries, and that violate human rights and exacerbate HIV transmission, AIDS-Free World and its legal team have filed a document—a “Petition”—on behalf of two Jamaicans to challenge the so-called “anti-sodomy law” that violates their human rights.

AIDS-Free World has been guided by its Legal Advisor on Marginalized Groups, Maurice Tomlinson, a Jamaican lawyer and activist, and supported financially by the MAC AIDS Foundation. The organization has worked for over two years in support of Jamaican human rights, LGBT, and AIDS advocacy groups’ multi-pronged efforts to promote tolerance and end discrimination in the country. At the activists’ request, AIDS-Free World developed a legal strategy to complement their efforts, beginning with training Jamaican advocates and lawyers to collect and document evidence of human rights violations. The organization’s Legal Director, Betsy Apple, assembled a team of contract and pro bono attorneys to support AIDS-Free World’s role as lead counsel, working in conjunction with Mr. Tomlinson. AIDS-Free World will be joined by Jamaican/British barrister Anthony Gifford in its role as lead counsel presenting the petitioners’ case to the IACHR when the hearing occurs. Ultimately, however, it is the two young gay men from Jamaica, the “petitioners,” who are actually challenging their country’s “anti-sodomy law.” AIDS-Free World’s legal team also comprises attorneys from the US law firm of Thompson Hine (David Schwartz, Samir Varma, Jaelyn Edwards, David Townsend, and Kirstin Keefe), and Professor James Wilets of Florida’s Nova Southeastern University Law Center, which also provided student assistance.

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11. Who, exactly, are the Petitioners?

The Petitioners in this case are two young gay men from Jamaica who will challenge the Jamaican anti-sodomy law on behalf of themselves and other LGBT. They have experienced constant and serious human rights abuses because of their sexual orientation, and believe that these violations stem from the legalized violence and discrimination against them (and people like them), as authorized by the anti- gay law. Their names and identities are being withheld from all documents relating to this challenge that are publicly available.

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12. Why are the Petitioners’ names and identities kept secret?

The Petitioners have courageously come forward to challenge the law, understanding the risk that if their role in this legal challenge were to become public, they and possibly their families could be subjected to even more harassment, abuse, violence, and discrimination than before. To be homosexual in Jamaica is dangerous, and to be openly and publicly homosexual is to live under constant threat. Consequently, the Petitioners have requested that the IACHR keep their identities anonymous for all public purposes.

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13. What has AIDS-Free World done to help the Petitioners (besides representing them in this
legal challenge)?

AIDS-Free World has worked closely with the Petitioners and with others in their position to try to get the government of Jamaica to redress abuses they have experienced in the past and to prevent future abuses. AIDS-Free World has helped the Petitioners to report the violations they have experienced to the Jamaican government, when they chose to do so.

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14. If the Petitioners fear for their safety, what has AIDS-Free World done to protect them?

AIDS-Free World has informed the IACHR about the serious safety risks the Petitioners face, and has asked the IACHR to contact the government of Jamaica directly and urge officials there to take measures to protect the petitioners. This formal process, applied in cases of extreme threat, is known as a request to grant “precautionary measures.” The IACHR responded positively to AIDS-Free World’s request, and in turn requested that the Jamaican government adopt precautionary measures on behalf of the Petitioners. Unfortunately, the government of Jamaica has yet to respond to the IACHR. AIDS-Free World periodically asks the IACHR to renew its request that the Jamaican government protect the Petitioners, and the organization will continue to ask until the government responds.

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15. What exactly is the IACHR authorized to do?

The IACHR promotes and protects human rights in the Americas region. It does this through various activities, including:
•   Undertaking site visits either to examine the general human rights situation or to investigate specific instances of human rights abuses in a country;
•   Publishing reports and studies about human rights issues in particular countries;
•   Convening meetings, seminars and conferences to discuss a range of human rights topics;
•   Suggesting that countries adopt particular measures to promote human rights;
•   Urging governments to take precautionary measures to protect specific individuals who are at risk;
•   Receiving and reviewing individual complaints (petitions) regarding human rights abuses occurring in countries in the region; and,
•   Interacting with the Inter-American Court on Human Rights by referring cases to the Court, if warranted, and by seeking advisory opinions from the Court on questions of interpretation of the American Convention on Human Rights (see question #18, below).

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16. What is a “petition” filed at the IACHR?

A petition is a specific complaint lodged by an individual, a group of people, or an organization, alleging violations of human rights in a particular country. The IACHR has the authority to review petitions that claim that a government has failed to fulfill its human rights obligations described in the American Convention on Human Rights or other regional human rights treaties. A petition is similar to a “complaint” in a legal case, in that it must describe:
•   The parties who are bringing the complaint (the “petitioners”),
•   The people who are harmed by the violations (the “victims”),
•   The efforts those petitioners have made to seek redress in domestic courts,
•   The specific violations that have occurred, and
•   The reasons why the particular government is responsible for those alleged violations.

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17. On what basis are the Petitioners and AIDS-Free World challenging the Jamaican “anti-
sodomy” law?

AIDS-Free World is helping the Petitioners in this case to challenge the law on the grounds that it violates numerous rights that are protected under an international treaty called the American Convention on Human Rights. Jamaica is a party to the American Convention on Human Rights, and, therefore, it is legally required to abide by the treaty’s obligations.

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18. What is the American Convention on Human Rights?

The American Convention on Human Rights (American Convention) is an international multilateral treaty. A treaty is essentially an agreement between two or more countries, and when more than two countries sign it, it is “multilateral.” When a country’s government “ratifies” or becomes a “party” to a treaty, this means that the government has agreed to be legally bound by all of the obligations described in the treaty. Countries in the Americas region can become party to the American Convention, and if they do, the IACHR and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights are charged with assessing whether those parties have complied with the treaty.
The American Convention lists and describes the different obligations of countries that are party to it, and also describes the various rights that citizens in those countries can expect their governments to protect, respect, and fulfill. Many of the rights enumerated in the American Convention reflect the rights described in other international treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

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19. What rights in the American Convention does Jamaica’s “anti-sodomy law” violate?

Some of the rights that AIDS-Free World and its legal team have asserted are violated by Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law and contained in the American Convention are the rights to:
• Life
• Humane treatment
• Privacy
• Freedom of expression and association
• Rights of the family
• Freedom of movement and residence
• Right to participate in government
• Right to health

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20. What is the ultimate goal of this legal challenge?

With this petition, AIDS-Free World is asking the IACHR to declare the “anti-sodomy law” in violation of international human rights standards, and recommend to the Jamaican government that it reform the law so that it no longer criminalizes same-sex sexual conduct. Essentially, AIDS-Free World wants the IACHR to inform the Jamaican government that it is not acceptable to criminalize homosexual sex through its laws.
We expect that the IACHR will find that Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law directly violates or contributes to violations of rights protected under the American Convention on Human Rights. Numerous international bodies already have ruled that similar laws around the world violate human rights such as privacy, protection from cruel and inhuman treatment as well as the right to freedom of expression.

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21. Is the Jamaican government obligated to listen to the IACHR?

Although the Jamaican government is obligated to participate in the proceedings before the IACHR, it is not legally bound by the decision or recommendations that the IACHR makes. The IACHR is not a court with authority to make legal decisions that Jamaica must honor, so its decisions have less force than those of other courts.

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22. If Jamaica is not obligated to listen to the Inter-American Commission, why not go to the
Inter-American Court?

In order for the Inter-American Court to have authority (also known as jurisdiction) to hear cases complaining of specific violations in countries in the Americas, a country has to agree to the Court’s jurisdiction. Jamaica has refused to agree to the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court, which means that the Court is not authorized to hear cases of human rights violations involving Jamaica.

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23. What, then, is the purpose of the IACHR petition, if it doesn’t result in a legally binding
decision against the government of Jamaica?

Although an IACHR decision against the government of Jamaica will not be binding, it will be very embarrassing for the country internationally and, if ignored, will have immediate negative implications for Jamaica’s reputation. This is an especially serious issue for the country because Jamaica relies on international goodwill for tourism, its main foreign exchange earner. If the Jamaican government ignores the IACHR decision, it is possible for the OAS General Assembly (which is the main legislative body for that regional body, the Organization of American States) to consider whether countries in the region want to take action and sanction Jamaica. Jamaica is a highly indebted developing nation and the government depends heavily on donor funds to supplement the national budget. Sanctions would make it very challenging for the government to meet its obligations. In an earlier case before the IACHR against Jamaica, the IACHR decided that the government of Jamaica should pay compensation to victims of illegal killings by police, and Jamaica paid. The fact that the Jamaican government abided by the decision of the IACHR before suggests that it will do so again.

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24. What does this case mean for other countries in the Americas (and is the IACHR’s decision
binding upon them)?

Decisions of the IACHR do not serve as “precedent” for subsequent cases at the IACHR (even if the facts or issues are similar) in the same way that decisions from court cases often dictate the decisions in later, similar cases. Nonetheless, the IACHR regularly refers to its previous decisions when hearing matters of a similar nature. In this case, the decision will be highly persuasive for the protection of human rights of homosexuals across the Caribbean, North, Central and South America.

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25. Why is this case important?

For the Petitioners
AIDS-Free World has brought this petition to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the Petitioners (and others like them). Despite the fact that the IACHR urged the government of Jamaica to adopt precautionary measures to protect the Petitioners, the Jamaican government has so far failed to protect them from ongoing human rights violations. In addition, their access to potentially life-saving HIV and AIDS-related prevention, testing, treatment, and support services continues to be restricted by the very existence of the Jamaican law. A favorable decision in this case would provide Petitioners with more tools and greater leverage to demand that the government of Jamaica protect their safety and their health.

For the Caribbean
Eleven English-speaking countries in the Caribbean still criminalize homosexual sex, and all of them are subject to the Inter-American system for the protection of human rights. Within these countries, homosexuals like the Petitioners are regularly exposed to human rights violations as a result of their countries’ laws. Despite domestic and international pressure, the governments of these countries steadfastly have refused to repeal the laws on the grounds that they legitimately reflect local cultures and beliefs. The AIDS-Free World petition, therefore, will be crucial in determining whether the Commission believes that anti-sodomy laws violate the human rights principles articulated in the American Convention. If that determination is made, all other countries in the region in which similar laws exist will find themselves in violation of the American Convention as well, unless they eliminate those laws.

For other regions
Most regions of the world (with the exception of Asia) have regional human rights bodies similar to the IACHR and/or Inter-American Court on Human Rights. While these other regional human rights bodies, such as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, are not bound by decisions coming out of the IACHR, they likely will look to these decisions when they are confronted with similar issues. Criminalization of same-sex sexual conduct and the abuse of the human rights of homosexuals exist in many African countries. Consequently, legal challenges to African anti-sodomy (or similar) laws in the African regional human rights bodies will benefit from a positive decision in the IACHR.

For the world
The UN Human Rights Council, which is the primary body in the UN dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights, recently asked the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to report on the state of human rights for homosexuals around the world. This petition highlights the role of law in contributing to human rights abuses against homosexuals, and therefore, will be of interest (and use) to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

For the fight against HIV
The UN Global Commission on HIV and the Law is reviewing the effects of law on the spread of HIV amongst MSM. One of the chief arguments in this case, that Jamaica’s anti-sodomy law contributes to the 32% HIV prevalence rate among Jamaican MSM as compared to 1.6% in the general population, will be a key factor for the Commission’s final report.

For the development of international law
Many national or local domestic courts regularly look to decisions from international human rights bodies when deciding human rights cases. The decision in this case, therefore, will help to build a body of law that domestic courts within the region and around the world can draw on to address current and future challenges to anti-sodomy laws. For example, in Belize, where the country’s anti-sodomy law is no longer protected in the constitution, a challenge to the law is expected to have its first hearing in December 2011. No doubt the Belizean court will note with interest the AIDS-Free World petition before the IACHR. This is especially likely since, as of January 2012, one of the new IACHR Commissioners who will hear the AIDS-Free World petition is from Belize. Other jurisdictions within the Caribbean, such as Guyana, are also hearing similar cases about laws that discriminate against homosexuals. A ruling from the IACHR certainly will factor into their decisions.

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The IACHR Petition Process

26. How long does a petition take to be processed?

The processing of a petition at the IACHR goes through various stages that allow both the petitioners and the country’s government sufficient time and opportunity to fully advise the IACHR about the human rights situation inspiring the petition. This can be a lengthy process and may take years, though something far shorter is also possible. The length of time depends on various factors, such as the number of petitions being heard by the IACHR, the responsiveness of the government and the petitioners to the IACHR’s requests for information, the seriousness of the human rights violations alleged in the Petition, and other questions that may arise.

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27. What is the process by which the IACHR decides upon a petition?

A petition will normally go through the following process:
a)   The IACHR reviews a petition and determines whether that petition actually alleges a violation of the American Convention or another treaty about which the IACHR has authority to hear complaints.
b)   The IACHR assigns a case number to that petition and begins to process it as a case.
c)   The IACHR may decide that the petition doesn’t meet procedural requirements, and decide that it will not review the petition. It is also possible that the IACHR may decide that no rights have been violated, and may dismiss the petition.
d)   When a case is opened and a number is assigned, the relevant parts of the petition are sent to the government with a request for information.
e)   Throughout the processing of the case, each party (petitioner and government) is asked to comment on the responses of the other. The IACHR also may carry out its own investigations, conduct site visits, or request specific information from the parties.
f)   The IACHR might hold a hearing, in which both parties would be present and asked to set forth their legal and factual arguments.
g)   In almost every case, the IACHR will offer to help the parties to negotiate a “friendly settlement” if they so desire. If the parties agree to a friendly settlement, the IACHR will not issue a final decision.
h)   When the parties have provided the IACHR and each other with comprehensive information, including legal briefs and supporting evidence, and when the IACHR decides that it has sufficient information, the processing of a case is completed.
i)   The IACHR then prepares a confidential report with its conclusions and general recommendations to the government.
j)   The Commission gives the government a period of time to resolve the situation and to comply with the recommendations of the IACHR.
k)   Once this time period has expired, the IACHR may prepare a second report, which is similar to the initial report, but also contains conclusions and recommendations.
l)   The IACHR may then give the government more time to resolve the situation and to comply with the recommendations of the IACHR.
m) At the end of this second period granted to the government, the IACHR usually will publish its report. This is particularly true if the government fails to comply with the IACHR’s recommendations. If the government ultimately cooperates, the IACHR may decide not to publish its report.

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28. What will happen to the Petitioners in the meantime?

On September 21, 2011, the IACHR asked the government of Jamaica, upon AIDS-Free World’s request, to adopt precautionary measures to protect the Petitioners from harm. Unfortunately, the government of Jamaica has failed to contact the Petitioners or their representatives to discuss potential protective measures. In the meantime, the Petitioners remain in danger of human rights violations and have altered their lives to avoid harassment, discrimination, and abuse.

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29. Whom do I contact for more information about this petition?

AIDS Free World:
Maurice Tomlinson, Esq.
Legal Advisor, Marginalized Groups
AIDS-Free World
Montego Bay, Jamaica W.I.
Tel: 1.876.952.3688
Email: mat@aidsfreeworld.org

Betsy Apple, Esq.
Legal Director and General Counsel
AIDS-Free World
155 Water Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Tel: 1.212.729.5084
Email: ba@aidsfreeworld.org

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View the press release about the IACHR petition here.

Download a copy of this Q&A here (PDF, 226KB)

Ending the Silence on the Rights of Homosexuals in the Commonwealth

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:55:00 -0400

With the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting set to begin on October 28, AIDS-Free World appealed to the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and Commonwealth Chairperson-in-Office, the Honorable Kamla Persad-Bissessar, MP, to end the silence on the issue of full human rights for homosexuals in the Commonwealth and place the issue on the agenda of the CHOGM.

October 10, 2011

The Honourable Kamla Persad-Bissessar, MP
Prime Minister, Trinidad and Tobago and
Commonwealth Chairperson-in-Office

Your Excellency:

We are appealing to you, in your dual capacities as Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago and outgoing Commonwealth Chair-in-Office, to apply your considerable influence to a matter of urgent concern. It is our hope that you will use your leadership to break the Commonwealth’s collective silence on the issue of state- sponsored discrimination against gays and lesbians. Because you have earned the respect of your peers, you are in a unique position to ensure that the Prime Ministers and Presidents of the Commonwealth engage in a frank and open discussion of criminalization based on sexual orientation.

We call upon you to take decisive action by placing this issue firmly on the agenda of the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Australia. Discussion of the Commonwealth’s homophobic laws is long overdue, and the responsibilities of leadership demand that it take place at the highest levels without further delay.

Homosexuals in many parts of the Commonwealth including Trinidad & Tobago are under siege. As you know, that particular form of prejudice and discrimination is the legacy of British colonialism. Great Britain and most of its former colonies in high-income countries outgrew their homophobic histories long ago, having recognized that human rights apply to everyone. But across most of the English-speaking Caribbean and in several low- and middle-income former British colonies in Africa, the persecution of homosexuals is supported by law. In those countries, homophobia is spreading with frightening speed and increasing violence.

We understand that the Eminent Persons Group that was formed in Trinidad & Tobago in 2009 will table its final report this month at CHOGM. The report will point out that two related facts distinguish Commonwealth countries in deeply problematic ways: rates of HIV in the countries of the Commonwealth are twice what they are in the rest of the world, and 41 of the Commonwealth’s 54 member countries have laws that promote the systematic violation of gay and lesbian citizens’ fundamental human rights.

AIDS-Free World has written in the past to Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma asking him to reserve a place on the CHOGM agenda for a full discussion of the member countries’ anti-gay laws and practices. The Secretariat’s Human Rights Officer replied on Mr. Sharma’s behalf to explain that CHOGM’s agenda is determined by governments, and to suggest that we bring our recommendation to the attention of a supportive Head of Government.

We believe that you have the courage to raise an issue that the Commonwealth as a whole has been afraid to address. Although your own country continues to criminalize homosexuality, you have personally decried discrimination against sexual minorities. You are no doubt conscious that there are inherent contradictions when you call upon governments to honor their commitments to equity, as you did at a UN High-Level Meeting on Women’s Political Participation in September, and yet govern a country where human rights are compartmentalized, and citizens, including women, are persecuted because of their sexual orientation. This inconsistency between human rights and homophobia within and between countries must be addressed by all Commonwealth Heads of Government.

Excellency, CHOGM is imminent, and we fear that yet again, Commonwealth leaders will shy away from discussing sexual orientation and the law, despite the fact that this particular Commonwealth dilemma is of growing global concern. We ask you to exert your influence and leadership to ensure that the forum is used to debate this crucial human rights issue at the highest levels and in a civilized way.

Respectfully yours,

Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan
Co-Directors
AIDS-Free World

In response, we received a letter from Dr. Shakiratu Sanusi, Human Rights Officer for the Commonwealth Secretariat.

21 October 2011

Dear Stephen and Paula,

The Commonwealth Secretary-General, Mr. Kamalesh Sharma, has seen your correspondence and asked me to thank you for your e-mail of 10 October 2011 under cover of which you sent to him a copy of your letter to the Honourable Kamla Persad-Bissessar, MP. I can assure you that your views have been taken carefully into account.

The Commonwealth recognises that respect for fundamental human rights is critical to promoting peace, prosperity and tolerance. The Commonwealth Secretariat endeavours always to remind the Commonwealth family that vilification and targeting on the grounds of sexual orientation are at odds with Commonwealth values.

Indeed, the 2009 Affirmation of Commonwealth Values and Principles includes a clear commitment to human rights, tolerance, respect and understanding.

We thank you for raising your concerns with us.

We remain engaged on the issue of the human rights landscape of our member countries, inclusive of LGBTI equality.

Sincerely,

Dr. Shakiratu Sanusi
Human Rights Officer

In Memory of Winstone Zulu

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:43:00 -0400

Winstone Zulu, colleague, friend and mentor to everyone at AIDS-Free World, died October 12 after a long battle with a virus that eventually defeated his body, but never managed to subdue his passion for justice, his extraordinary intellect or his boundless hope. Winstone was an enormous, affecting presence for those who had the privilege of knowing him and working with him, and his passion, intellect and charisma come through in the work that he leaves behind.

A memorial fund has been established at RESULTS, Inc., to provide financial support to Winstone's family. Winstone is survived by his wife, Vivian, and their four children, Michael, age 14; Waza, 11; Mwenda, 7; and Dan, 5. 100 percent of your generous contribution will go directly to Winstone's family in their time of need. Click here to contribute, to the memorial fund.

Winstone first gained international recognition by calling for greater attention to be paid to tuberculosis among people living with AIDS. At a time when antiretrovirals were still expensive and difficult to obtain in Africa, many people were dying for lack of access to tuberculosis drugs that cost only ten dollars. Winstone himself was able to defeat tuberculosis, but lost four brothers and two sisters-in-law to the disease. In a speech delivered in 2003 at the World Conference of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Winstone stressed the need to deal not only with HIV infection but also with the infections they caused.

We all know that antiretrovirals are ultimately what we need. There are medications that are available now that have shown they can prolong life and improve the quality of life. But for many of us the dream of getting antiretrovirals is much more farfetched than the dream of getting drugs for ten dollars that can cure you of your disease. Even to me, who has been an AIDS activist for a long time, this is a new way of looking at things. And now when I see someone living with HIV, I say, well, if you don’t have antiretrovirals now, you should go and get checked for tuberculosis. If you have tuberculosis, it can be cured.

A video of Winstone’s remarks at the HIV/TB Global Leaders Forum in 2008 displays Winstone’s skill as a speaker.

Later in his life, Winstone became an active disability rights advocate, stressing the need to provide HIV education, prevention and treatment services to people with disabilities. Winstone contracted polio as a young child, which caused him to have to use crutches to walk. In a piece written for Pambazuka News, Winstone explored the discrimination against people with disabilities.

My expectations of society for people with disabilities are basic but fundamental. I cannot speak for all people with different forms of disabilities. But generally, I just want to be treated as any other human being. I want an environment that can provide me with full access to what everyone else has a right to. That means the full range of human rights including the right to be involved and actively participate in all issues that affect the human family. I don’t want to be ignored simply because I am using a wheel chair to move from point A to point B.

In a recent op-ed written for the New York Times, Winstone attacked the prejudices that continue to increase the HIV risks faced by people with disabilities.

I spoke at an AIDS conference not long ago, and after the talk, someone asked me how I had contracted H.I.V. 'Well,' I replied, 'sexually.' Staring at my crutches, which I have used since I got polio as a child, she exclaimed, 'But how?' The assumption that all disabilities — of hands, feet, hearing, sight — somehow also affect the ability and desire to have sex is common. It would be comic if it didn’t have such serious consequences: people with disabilities are rarely exposed to sex education and are almost never considered in need of information about H.I.V. and treatment for it. As a result, although people with disabilities are just as likely to be sexually active as people without, our H.I.V. infection rate is up to three times higher.

The outpouring of loving remembrances of Winstone in the wake of his death capture the man and the effect he had on those around him.

Father Michael Kelly, who worked with Winstone at Kara Counseling in Lusaka, wrote in the Zambian newspaper The Post:

In 1990 it was unheard of for anyone to go public about their HIV status and even today very few people are willing to have their HIV positive status known. Winstone fought all his life against discrimination and stigma on behalf of People Living with HIV and AIDS. Winstone's astonishing courage as the first person to go public about his HIV status as part of Kara's AIDS outreach education campaign was immediately honoured by President Kaunda who gave a special luncheon at State House with Winstone as the guest of honour. In the early 90's, Winstone was almost daily in the media as there was no one else willing to talk personally about issues of living with HIV/AIDS at that time.

Mercedes Sayagues, a reporter who met Winstone in the early-1990s, wrote of Winstone’s dedication.

He was under no illusions — about greed, corruption, complacency and hypocrisy among politicians, donors and fellow activists — but he kept alive his dream: that treatment was a right of Africans, of the disabled, gays and sex workers. That TB is as bad as HIV and deserves as much attention and resources. That discrimination does not have a place under the African sky.

Stephen Lewis, in remarks read at a memorial service for Winstone in Zambia, expressed his amazement upon first meeting Winstone, and captures the feeling that so many had while in his presence.

My mind went back to our first meeting in 2002 when I was the UN Envoy, and Winstone headed the Association of People Living with AIDS. I remember thinking at the time: where did this incredibly articulate and intense man come from? How did he find the strength to be so critical of government; to be so unflinching in his demands for treatment and care for everyone who needed it? Where did he find the emotional and physical reserves to be so principled and uncompromising?

I was, quite simply, stunned in his presence.

Winstone's colleagues at AIDS-Free World and the countless people he assisted, influenced, and emboldened will forever be indebted to Winstone. Rest in peace, dear friend.

Read AIDS-Free World's remembrance of Winstone here.

News Coverage of Ongoing Violence in Zimbabwe

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:00:00 -0400

MDC activists attacked, hospitalised
September 13, 2011
Story on the kidnapping and beating of two MDC party members by suspected ZANU-PF militants.

Violence in Harare as ZANU-PF Militants Attack MDC Backers Over Market Stalls
September 7, 2011
Story on attacks by ‘ZANU-PF youths’ on vendors at a market, calling for the expulsion of any vendors belonging to MDC.

Violence rocks Parly opening
September 7, 2011
A more extensive story on the violence that occurred on opening day of Parliament, including the above-mentioned market attacks and other attacks on MDC members and supporters.

Zanu-PF violence hinders committees
August 26, 2011
Story on the postponing of parliamentary hearings on political violence and corruption following the raiding of Parliament by a ZANU-PF mob.

Marange diamond field: Zimbabwe torture camp discovered
August 8, 2011
Story on the ‘torture camp’ at the Marange diamond fields, includes references to women being raped in the camps.

ZANU-PF youths up their game of violence
May 5, 2011
Story on the increase in reports of violence by ZANU-PF supporters.

ZANU PF violence continues despite SADC rebuke
April 20, 2011
Report on the attack of an MDC supporter and campaigns of intimidation and violence against MDC supporters.

ZANU-PF supporters invade MDC plots in Epworth
April 20, 2011
Story on ZANU-PF supporters invading an area and attempting to steal plots of land from MDC supporters, claiming that MDC supporters were no longer allowed to own land in the area.

ZANU-PF violence escalates in Manicaland
February 27, 2011
Story on violence breaking out between a group of MDC supporters and ZANU-PF supporters, with allegations that a ZANU-PF politician is using violence and intimidation to win a parliamentary seat in a constituency that is majority MDC.

Zimbabwe’s Human Rights Record Under Scrutiny

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:00:00 -0400

AIDS-Free World remains deeply concerned about the brutal rape campaign perpetrated during Zimbabwe’s 2008 presidential elections, as well as the likelihood that the violence will recur when the country returns to the polls next year. President Robert Mugabe – who unleashed mobs of his ZANU-PF party’s youth militias to rape, torture, and kill opposition party members – has publicly stated that the next presidential elections will be held no later than March 2012.¹ Reports of politically motivated violence within the country continue, and there is no indication that ZANU-PF has dismantled its youth militias or the country-wide base camps used to torture and rape their opponents. The campaign of rape that already took place in Zimbabwe was both widespread and systematic and constitutes crimes against humanity under international law. No one has been held accountable for these crimes.

As part of our ongoing efforts to push the international community to prevent another rape campaign, AIDS-Free World again contacted all of the UN Member State missions in Geneva, in advance of Zimbabwe’s Universal Periodic Review before the UN Human Rights Council. The Universal Periodic Review is a relatively new mechanism of the United Nations during which the UN Member States publicly review the human rights practices of every country in the world. Each country is up for review every four years, and during a review they receive questions and recommendations from other Members States.² It is a significant tool because it forces a very public, international examination of human rights practices, even in reticent countries, and it provides human rights activists with public statements and commitments from their individual countries, which may then be used to hold feet to the fire and strengthen NGO advocacy.

AIDS-Free World sent a letter to the missions of all 192 Member States with a copy of our Zimbabwe report, Electing To Rape, as well as suggested questions for the government, and recommendations to insist that Zimbabwe both redress past and refrain from future campaigns of rape. We were pleased that Austria, Canada, and New Zealand specifically mentioned the widespread rape and sexual violence that took place in 2008, which has been largely ignored in many human rights reports that catalogue the other horrors of Zimbabwe’s political violence. Canada’s first recommendation to Zimbabwe was to “undertake impartial, independent, and comprehensive investigations into the 2008 election-related violence, including cases of rape, with protection for witnesses, survivors and their families, and to prosecute the alleged perpetrators.” Austria also expressed concerns about impunity, particularly for crimes committed by law enforcement, and asked Zimbabwe to describe what measures had been taken to address “alleged summary executions, torture and sexual violence during the elections in June/July 2008 and to hold the perpetrators accountable.” New Zealand noted that there has thus far been “no adequate investigation or accountability for abuses that occurred at the time of the 2008 election, including violence against women and rape.”

A total of thirteen countries specifically addressed the general politically motivated violence that occurred in 2008, including Zimbabwe’s neighbor South Africa, which recommended that all credible allegations from elections be investigated. In addition, a large number of countries pressed Zimbabwe to ratify the Convention Against Torture, and to issue standing invitations to all UN Special Procedures mandate-holders, a list that includes the Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and the Special Rapporteur on Torture.

AIDS-Free World will continue to use all of the legal and human rights mechanisms at our disposal to spur the international community to action and to prevent a repeat of 2008’s horrifying raping and brutality. We have had three meetings with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to share our evidence and ongoing concern, and AIDS-Free World Co-Directors met with a group of concerned UN Ambassadors in July. AIDS-Free World is using our legal dossier, containing testimony from rape survivors throughout Zimbabwe, to pursue legal avenues to prosecute the crimes against humanity that occurred, and we have forwarded our findings to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court. To read the report that helped inform governments in advance of this week’s Universal Periodic Review of Zimbabwe, please see Electing to Rape: Sexual Terror in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.

[1] http://dailymaverick.co.za/article/2011-09-05-no-more-dilly-dallying-mugabe-announces-zim-election-date

[2] For more information on the Universal Periodic Review process, please visit www.upr-info.org

Coca-Cola's Inadequate Response to its Sponsorship of Murder Music

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:20:00 -0400

In late April, Coke sponsored a concert in Jamaica that headlined notoriously homophobic artists. Since then, AIDS-FREE WORLD has attempted to engage the conscience and attention of Coke on this matter. Coca-Cola is in a position to take a leading corporate role and make a significant difference in fighting the homophobia that fuels the AIDS pandemic—if they choose to do so. Coca-Cola needs to act NOW in unmistakable and unfaltering ways to repair the harm wrought by its material support for murder musicians. Coca-Cola’s response must be stronger, louder, more effective, more meaningful and more lasting than the homophobic mayhem produced by the murder music industry. The Coca-Cola Company’s sponsorship of any murder music is inexplicable and their inaction in remedy is inexcusable.

The following letter was sent to Coca-Cola Chair of the Board and Chief Executive Officer Muthar Kent.

October 13, 2011

Dear Mr. Kent,

On October 6, 2011, AIDS-Free World made one last attempt to engage your company in an appropriate response to an appalling incident. We expected to have heard from Mr. Bucherati by now, and indicated that if we didn't, we would bring the letter to your attention. We have had no response at all. Kindly see the attached.

Best regards,

Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan
Co-Directors, AIDS-Free World

October 6, 2011

Mr. Steve Bucherati
Chief Diversity Officer
The Coca-Cola Company
One Coca-Cola Plaza
Atlanta, Georgia 30313

Dear Mr. Bucherati:

As you know, AIDS-Free World is outraged at Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of homophobic “murder music” performed during a concert in Montego Bay, Jamaica in late April 2011. Beginning with a formal complaint lodged on May 5th, our Jamaica-based Legal Advisor for Marginalized Groups, Mr. Maurice Tomlinson, engaged in a protracted but unproductive written and phone communication with you. Your communications have now ceased altogether.

As Mr. Tomlinson informed you, it shocked many in Jamaica to learn that Coca-Cola had contracted Sizzla and other homophobic Dancehall artists to entertain at its 4-day Coke Zero Live on the Waterfront music festival. But it surprised no one when Sizzla used the opportunity provided by Coca- Cola to perform the hate anthem “Boom Bye Bye” and once again to call—literally—for the murder of homosexuals. Predictably, he incited the audience to join in his tirade, and then dared the police and concert organizers to sanction him. Just as predictably, neither the Jamaican police nor Coca-Cola uttered a word of disapproval.

Needless to say in the age of YouTube, Sizzla’s heinous performance in Jamaica—with the Coke Zero logo emblazoned behind him — has been available for the past five months for all the world to view on the internet, including those of us who are lucky enough to live in countries where this sort of vile hate speech has been outlawed. It is inconceivable to us that you have utterly failed to respond to our efforts to focus your attention on Coca-Cola’s indefensible sponsorship decision. Our patience has run out, and we are now prepared to address our concerns to Chair of the Board and CEO, Mr. Muhtar Kent.

You suggested to Mr. Tomlinson that Coca-Cola was unaware of any connections between murder music and the notoriously violent, vulgar anti-gay musicians who performed at Coke Zero Live on the Waterfront in your company’s name. We find it quite surprising that every member of the company’s local staff should number among the very few Jamaicans who are not aware of Sizzla’s global reputation for inciting the torture and execution of homosexuals. To quote Coca-Cola on the topic of “brand” and sponsorship:

“‘Coca-Cola’ is aware of what is relevant in the lives of its target market such as sport, music and fashion. Life experiences are created around these interests. By getting involved in these daily experiences ‘Coca-Cola’ meets its sponsorship objectives.

...Sponsorship involves providing financial support, creative input, media support, and experience to an important event or activity organised by another party. In return, the company receives a public opportunity to be seen to support and be associated with an event, activity or person. Sponsorship is a crucial part of a public relations strategy because it is possible to reach a target audience with a specific message.”¹

In Mr. Tomlinson’s earlier communications, he pointed out at least one instance in Jamaica when the same anti-gay song performed by Sizzla was directly linked to the murder of a gay man. As you are no doubt now aware, Sizzla is proud of his reputation as a hatemonger who unfailingly uses his public appearances to encourage the murder of gays. He has been banned from the United Kingdom as well as from the USA, where The Coca-Cola Company is headquartered and where its company-wide standards are set and policies written. And yet, Coca-Cola gave Sizzla a headliner concert and material financial support—a combination that any reasonable observer would perceive as Coca-Cola’s stamp of approval on the performer, and an eagerness to associate your company’s products with his message.

In the interest of branding and sales, Coca-Cola helped to inflame extreme anti-gay sentiment in Jamaica. That homophobia, in consequence, fuels the country’s HIV and AIDS crisis. Calling for the execution of homosexuals, as Sizzla did at the Coca-Cola-sponsored music festival in Montego Bay, drives gay men underground and renders many unable to safely access HIV prevention, testing, and treatment services.

With markets and employees in every corner of the world, The Coca-Cola Company is all too familiar with the ravages of AIDS, and with the profound challenges of combating a pandemic fueled by discrimination. And Coca-Cola is no stranger to the fact that stigma is HIV’s most powerful ally. In other words, Mr. Bucherati, your company knows better.

The Coca-Cola Company’s sponsorship of any murder music is inexplicable. Your subsequent failure to act immediately to ensure that Coca-Cola disavowed the sort of public frenzy of homophobia whipped up by Sizzla cannot be excused.

Months ago, you assured us that Coca-Cola had suspended all concert sponsorships in Jamaica, and had in fact undertaken a worldwide review of its sponsorship policies in all of its global markets so as to avoid another incident like the Sizzla debacle. However, you failed to commit to a timeline for this alleged sponsorship policy review, and gave us no way to gauge the review’s progress, if any has been made. We have had to take our cues from the fact that five months have passed since Coke Zero Live on the Waterfront—five months during which one might assume that Coca-Cola succeeded in its efforts “to reach a target audience with a specific message”—and from the obvious fact that Coca-Cola has the resources and capacity to initiate and complete projects with great speed, provided that it considers them important.

You claim to have submitted a letter of apology to regional Jamaican newspapers; no letter was ever published. You promised to submit an article to all Jamaican newspapers once the sponsorship policy review was completed, apologizing for the Sizzla concert and announcing the new corporate policy.

No such renunciation or new policy announcement has appeared. The fact that you were relying on free newspaper coverage was almost, but not quite, amusing to the human rights defenders in Jamaica who risk their lives daily in a country that criminalizes them for who they are. Those brave men and women show up for work at their non-profits, and grapple for funds to run paid ads begging the public simply to tolerate them and allow them to live in peace, without terror or persecution (ads that, as your colleagues at Coca-Cola Jamaica will know, the television stations have refused to run.)

Coca -Cola hasn't just fallen short of the voluntary corporate social responsibility ideals to which the company has committed itself under the UN Global Compact; Coca-Cola’s actions have affirmatively produced damage. Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of Sizzla undermines the arduous work of Jamaican human rights groups seeking to eradicate the scourge of discrimination against homosexuals, and it undermines the work of UNAIDS and other international organizations that are attempting to reduce the HIV burden among the gay population. Until Coca-Cola takes the lead in denouncing homophobia, and takes decisive and public action in remedy, the public will be left with the impression that The Coca-Cola Company endorses violence, human rights violations, and homophobia.

Coca-Cola is a nimble global company with a capacity for sophisticated and rapid responses to any threats to its reputation. We have watched it move quickly to repair “brand damage” in other AIDS-related circumstances. We are aware of Mr. Muhtar Kent’s efforts to forge positive relationships, such as the recent partnership with UN Women. Coca-Cola states proudly that it was among the first to join the 10-year-old Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, which is now known as GBC Health. Your CEO did not hesitate to take the platform at the Clinton Global Initiative in September. Thus it is that as a company, Coca-Cola capitalizes on corporate social responsibility.

We attempted to engage your conscience and your attention on this matter. Your delays have now extended the damage done by the company’s sponsorship well past the point of easy remedies.

Coca-Cola needs to act in unmistakable and unfaltering ways to repair the harm wrought by its material support for murder musicians such as Sizzla. Coca-Cola’s response must be stronger, louder, more effective, more meaningful and more lasting than the homophobic mayhem produced by the murder music industry. You know as well as we do, Mr. Bucherati, that Coca-Cola is in a position to take a leading corporate role and make a significant difference in fighting the homophobia that fuels the AIDS pandemic.

AIDS-Free World requests your immediate response. And despite our impatience with your lethargy to date, we stand ready to provide any assistance we can to help right this dreadful wrong.

Sincerely,

Stephen Lewis and Paula Donovan
Co-Directors, AIDS-Free World

c.c: Maurice Tomlinson, Legal Advisor, Marginalized Groups

___________________

At the "Coke Zero LIVE on the Waterfront" event held in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on April 24, 2011, notoriously homophobic Jamaican Dancehall artist Sizzla launched a scathing attack on gays. He also performed a banned song which calls for the murder of homosexuals. During his performance, Sizzla made it clear that he feared no repercussions for his hate-mongering, neither from local authorities nor from sponsors of the event. As the major sponsor, Coca-Cola gave Sizzla a platform to spew his hate which, thanks to them, now flows around the world. We call on Coca-Cola to staunch this vitriolic flood by taking concrete steps to tackle homophobia which drives MSM underground away from effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support interventions. The following letter was sent by AIDS-Free World to the Coca-Cola Company.

May 27, 2011

Steve Bucherati
Chief Diversity Officer
The Coca-Cola Company

Dear Mr. Bucherati,

In a letter dated May 3, 2011, AIDS-Free World alerted The Coca-Cola Company (“Coca-Cola,” or “the Company”) to the fact that Jamaican performer Miguel Collins, also known as “Sizzla,” called for the murder of gays at the “Coke Zero LIVE on the Waterfront” event held in Montego Bay, Jamaica on April 24, 2011.

Coca-Cola’s response to our letter has been grossly inadequate. In an e-mail dated May 12, 2011, you indicated that the Company will submit a letter to the editor of a regional Jamaican newspaper apologizing for the event and “affirming our commitment to diversity and acceptance of all people.” You also said Coca-Cola will “suspend any music sponsorships in Jamaica until we can feel assured that this type of unacceptable behavior will not be repeated at events we sponsor.”

Sizzla and other like-minded Jamaican reggae/dancehall artistes have collectively recorded over 200 anti-gay songs which are regularly performed at sponsored events locally and internationally. Sizzla’s habitual hate-mongering against homosexuals was well-known, resulting in the revocation of his US visa. He all but had the label “Homophobe” stamped on his forehead. Despite his notorious history of anti-gay screeds at concerts, and the almost certain likelihood that such behaviour would happen again, Coca-Cola signed Sizzla to perform at this inaugural show in Montego Bay. Now, Coca-Cola pretends to act surprised —

“We clearly expressed that during the music event we expected the performers to behave in a manner consistent with our Company’s values. We specified no lyrics promoting violence or discrimination against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Diversity is one of our key values, and we do not tolerate discrimination of any kind.” (from your e-mail dated May 5)

— that the inevitable has occurred. We must first ask, where and how did Coca-Cola specify that the performers were prohibited from promoting homophobia? And if, indeed, Coca-Cola did prohibit such behavior contractually, why is the Company not outraged at this flagrant breach? And furthermore, where are the sanctions on Sizzla? Your response of May 12, which purports to set forth the “action steps [we] are taking to address the situation,” in fact, avoids the situation altogether. You, as Coca-Cola’s representative, promise to write a letter to the editor. You report that Coca-Cola has suspended music sponsorships in Jamaica “until we can feel assured that this type of unacceptable behavior will not be repeated at events we sponsor.” You express pride in the Company’s support of youth initiatives in Jamaica to promote safer sex as a way to address HIV. But you make no mention of specific action taken directly in response to Sizzla’s egregious, homophobic rant sponsored by Coca-Cola. How, exactly, will the Company address this heinous action?

Coca-Cola obviously did not exercise adequate due diligence with regard to the selection of Sizzla to perform at its sponsored event. Through this event, the Company further enabled Sizzla’s hate and gave him an effective platform from which to denounce the human rights of homosexuals.

Coca-Cola’s subsequent action in the wake of the Sizzla performance is woefully lacking. If, as you state, Coca-Cola was so concerned about the virulent hate typified by Sizzla and for which he and many other Jamaican artistes are well known, why were prohibitions and sanctions against homophobic performances not expressly contained in any of their contracts? Furthermore, you have given no indication that the Company’s policy has been changed by this incident. Nor have you indicated a commitment that from now on, wherever in the world Coca-Cola sponsors a music event, specific sanctions against hate-speech will be explicitly written into a performer’s contract.

Coca-Cola has been present in Jamaica for decades and is therefore well aware that the absence of hate-speech and hate crime legislation protecting homosexuals has enabled both state and non-state actors to engage in grave abuses of the rights of Jamaican lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender citizens. As Coca-Cola, no doubt, knows, Jamaica was named the most homophobic place on earth in a Time magazine article in 2006. International groups concerned with human rights have been trying to change that.

Coca-Cola is, itself, an international actor with a global mission: “To refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference.” Coca-Cola purports to take its responsibilities as a global citizen seriously, and one demonstration of that commitment is Coca-Cola’s membership in the UN Global Compact. As you know, the Compact calls on multinational corporations such as Coca-Cola to assess their contribution to human rights recognition in the countries in which they operate by asking themselves the following questions:

•Has the company made a human rights assessment of the situation in countries where it does, or intends to do, business so as to identify the risk of involvement in human rights abuses and the company's potential impact on the situation?
•Has the company established a monitoring system to ensure that its human rights policies are being implemented?

One of Coca-Cola’s stated values is diversity, “as inclusive as our brands.” Presumably, Coca-Cola decided to join the Global Compact because the Compact’s fundamental principles aligned with Coca-Cola’s mission, vision and values. These of course, include “Be[ing] a responsible citizen that makes a difference by helping build and support sustainable communities.” If Coca-Cola is to take seriously the Global Compact — not to mention its own vision, mission, and values--it must address issues of oppressive and deadly discrimination. Homophobic discrimination in Jamaica drives members of the LGBT community underground, away from effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support interventions. Jamaican men who have sex with men (MSM) regularly report being afraid to purchase water-based lubricants because of the threat of being “outed” and so they play Russian roulette with their lives, utilizing less effective (and often no) methods of prevention and protection against HIV. If Coca-Cola is to live its values in Jamaica, it must take every possible action to challenge this homophobic discrimination that gives rise to MSM and LGBT deaths from HIV and AIDS, and challenges directly the project of “helping build and support sustainable communities.”

The Coca-Cola-sponsored event in Jamaica, and consequently, Sizza’s homophobic rant, has impact far beyond Jamaica. The event’s promoter no doubt recorded it for global distribution and Coca-Cola’s support of this event provided Sizzla with a global platform for his homophobic hatred. Had Coca-Cola undertaken due diligence, it could have prevented, if not the event itself, as least its participation in it. Now, Coca-Cola must take responsibility for its failure, and for the resulting consequences.

Coca-Cola hasn't just fallen short of the voluntary corporate social responsibility ideals to which it has committed itself in the UN Global Compact. Coca-Cola’s actions have affirmatively produced damage. In our first letter, we advised you of two instances in Jamaica when the same anti-gay song performed by Sizzla was directly linked to the murder of gays. We have also pointed to the fact that research undertaken by the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus indicates that over 82.2% of Jamaicans consider themselves homophobic and the majority of these individuals listen to the type of music performed by Sizzla. Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of Sizzla has therefore undermined the arduous work of Jamaican human rights groups seeking to eradicate the scourge of discrimination against homosexuals as well as any attempt at reducing the HIV burden among the MSM population.

Our critique of Coca-Cola’s failures lead to an inevitable conclusion: the Company cannot fix its disastrous and damaging behavior simply by promising to write a free letter to the editor and temporarily suspending sponsorship of performers like Sizzla. It must and should do more to address its ethical responsibility to members of the marginalized and vulnerable homosexual Jamaican community it serves.

Specifically, we call on Coca-Cola to:

1) Within seven (7) days of the date of this letter, immediately publish a full-page advertisement in the Sunday edition of the three major Jamaican newspapers (the Jamaica Gleaner, the Jamaica Observer and the Sunday Herald) as well as a full-page advertisement in the Western Mirror denouncing Sizzla’s homophobic performance and expressing support for sexual diversity;

2) Issue a formal statement explaining that it will no longer sponsor artistes who are known to have performed and refuse to apologize for homophobic songs;

3) Include a clause in all future sponsorship agreements prohibiting homophobic speech or actions against performers, and in the event of a breach, specifying sanctions, including a termination of the sponsorship arrangement; and

4) Sponsor a concert in Jamaica devoted entirely to artists who have not engaged in homophobic slurs, and that specific condition would be the centrepiece of the advertising for the concert.

Although Coca-Cola is a multinational corporation, it is based in the United States. As you know, the US has been a leader in challenging homophobic speech by dance-hall musicians from Jamaica, and is doubtless dismayed by Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of such musicians. The US is not the only government to feel this way. Doubtless other governments, and civil society activists, were they to learn of what was done by Coca-Cola in Jamaica, would be equally horrified and outraged.

Coca-Cola is present in 200+ countries. It can stand beside governments that seek to challenge homophobia by demonstrating its real — not rhetorical — commitment to diversity and to sustainable communities. It will take real integrity — another of Coca-Cola’s core values — to adopt the actions we prescribe above. Coca-Cola has the opportunity to live its values and contribute positively to a discrimination-free future in Jamaica, but only if it decisively addresses its mistakes.

Sincerely yours,

Maurice Tomlinson
Legal Advisor, Marginalized Groups
Montego Bay, Jamaica
On behalf of AIDS-Free World
Stephen Lewis, Paula Donovan
Co-Directors, AIDS-Free World

Winstone Zulu, 1964-2011

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:43:00 -0400

Winstone Zulu, colleague, friend and mentor to everyone at AIDS-Free World, died October 12 after a long battle with a virus that eventually defeated his body, but never managed to subdue his passion for justice, his extraordinary intellect or his boundless hope. Our hearts go out to Winstone’s wife Vivian and his beloved children, to his many family members, friends and fellow activists, and to the countless people whose own lives were so enriched by his life. Winstone gently instructed and effortlessly inspired us; he led us to delve deeper, to open our eyes wider, to press harder, and always, always to laugh longer and louder.

Last March, while in New York for an AIDS-Free World staff meeting, he talked nonstop as we hailed a taxi and took a long ride across town. As our driver unfolded Winstone’s wheelchair at the curb, he whispered, “Who IS that man?” and when told that Winstone was a Zambian AIDS activist, he marveled: “In ten years of driving a cab, I can never remember being so fascinated by what a passenger was saying that I didn’t want to reach my destination. Are you sure he’s not famous?!” When told what the cab driver had said, Winstone laughed out loud in delighted surprise: “That’s what I like about New York. Everyone’s so…funny!”

In a recent email, Winstone happily reported that despite feeling very weak, he’d been able to get online and help out with the choice of Zambia’s reps to the Global Fund’s Country Coordinating Mechanism. Few people had his dogged determination, and it’s hard to think of anyone more determinedly generous.

Our grief is deep, but it is far surpassed by our gratitude; to know Winstone was to be privileged. Every encounter relieved us of a little more of our ignorance and encouraged us to keep striving — as he always did — for more knowledge and insight. After years of AIDS and TB activism, Winstone embraced the issue of disability and HIV in typical fashion, with a combination of curiosity, fascination, humility and a dash of bemusement. “Why is it that when I’m standing up using crutches, people address me directly, but as soon as I’m in a wheelchair, people feel the need to ask whoever’s pushing me, “Does he take his tea with milk?” He proudly joined the ranks of disability rights activists in his 40s, and vowed never again to be photographed without his crutches.

Although his exceptional life ended much too soon, Winstone changed the world for the better while he was here. His wise words, his indomitable spirit, his purpose and his passion will live on through all whose lives he touched.

Read AIDS-Free World's memorial to Winstone here.

Russian Federation on the Wrong Side of History

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:21:00 -0400

Panel remarks by Stephen Lewis, delivered during the International Forum on MDG-6¹ in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Moscow, Russia, October 11, 2011.

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court of Canada—my country—rendered a unanimous decision to keep open and functioning the only supervised drug injection facility in the country, called Insite. It had been a battle that raged over several years. The Federal government was totally opposed to the continuation of Insite. The Supreme Court said the Federal government was wrong.

The judgment read, in part: “The experiment has proved successful. Insite has saved lives and improved health without increasing the incidence of drug use and crime in the surrounding area … there have been no discernible negative impacts on the public safety and health objectives of Canada during its eight years of operation.”

The decision amounts to a sweeping endorsement of “harm reduction.”

Just three months earlier, in June of this year, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, chaired by the former President of Brazil, Fernando Cardoso, produced its report. It branded the war on drugs a complete and colossal failure without a single redeeming feature.

Their report read, in part: “End the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others … Offer health and treatment services to those in need … including not just methadone and buprenorphine treatment, but also the heroine-assisted treatment programs that have proved successful in many European countries and Canada. Implement syringe access and other harm reduction measures that have proven effective in reducing transmission of HIV … respect the human rights of people who use drugs.”

It is a matter of both irony and tragedy that the Russian Federation pays virtually no attention to any of this. The Russian Federation is, quite simply, on the wrong side of history. And because Russia is on the wrong side of history, this country—as Michel Sidibe, the Executive-Director of UNAIDS pointed out yesterday—this country has one of the most frightening increases in the rates of HIV/AIDS in the world.

The numbers are driven by injecting drug use. This is the only part of the world that shows such a dramatic spike in HIV. The Commission on HIV and the Law will find it hard to believe that the law in Russia is being used to enhance AIDS rather than to curtail it.

The work and the declarations of the United Nations show us what the policies should be; policies rooted in human rights principles. In the Russian Federation, we must do what we can, as an immediate priority, to ensure that people who inject drugs do not get sick and die of HIV. As an urgent matter—indeed, as an emergency matter—they should have access to clean injection equipment and to proven methods of treatment of drug dependence, especially the kind that enables people to stop injecting. Through expansion of sterile needle and syringe exchange programs, and methadone or similar therapy for heroin dependence, countries across Europe, including some in the former Soviet sphere, have averted millions of cases of HIV transmission and saved millions of lives. The solution could not be plainer.

It is heart-breaking and indefensible, therefore, that with nearly two million people who use opiates, most of whom inject, the Russian Federation still does not ensure access to these simple and low-cost services and, much worse, uses the power of the state—that is to say, the power of the law—to erect barriers to their provision.

I will never understand why, in 2011, the Russian Federation continues to ban the medical use of methadone, after almost 50 years of successful use of medication-assisted opiate therapy that has saved and stabilized millions of lives internationally. How is it possible for Russian health officials to continue to slander methadone when mountains of scientific evidence from international and regional experts has persuaded most of the rest of the world of its legitimacy?

These days, everyone demands “evidence-based” interventions. There could be no greater evidence-base than the medical use of methadone. But it’s outlawed in the Russian Federation. Yet, thousands are dying every year from preventable injection-related overdose and preventable HIV and hepatitis.

I appeal to the President and Prime Minister of the Russian Federation (and the future President and Prime Minister) to end this unconscionable denial of the rights of injecting drug users. I’m reminded of the denialism of the former President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki, who allowed hundreds of thousands of his citizens to die of AIDS on his watch because he didn’t believe in antiretroviral drugs. There are thousands dying here of AIDS-related illnesses because of a similar pattern of denialism. It makes absolutely no sense. It’s outrageous.

At some point, reasonable people must surely recognize that injecting drug use is an illness, a public health issue, not a target for punitive attack, or incarceration, or assault by the police. The mentality is profoundly warped … it’s as though injecting drug users weren’t human, and this environment of personal malice turns into the malice of the state.

I come here in my capacity as a member of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law. Like my fellow Commissioners, I recognize that there are limitations to what the law can achieve in respect of HIV. But examining the importance of law in the HIV response reminds us that people have a legal and human right to certain information and services and it is the obligation of governments to provide them. The countries where there is extensive drug injection, but virtually no HIV transmission linked to drug injection, have established legal protections for life-saving HIV prevention services.

In the Russian Federation there is no legal protection for saving the lives of people who inject drugs. And that startling element of negligence is compounded by another lapse: the flouting of due process and the rule of law when it comes to drug offences. Members of the Commission were shocked and dismayed to hear from civil society representatives at the Eastern European regional dialogue in May that people who use drugs are such easy targets for police extortion and abuse in Russia. Drug users and sex workers represent a second income for the police, so normal is the practice of extorting money from them during arrest and detention. The absence of fair investigation when faced with a trial was also frequently mentioned. What’s more, in the custody of the state, people who live with addiction are vulnerable to being interrogated and coerced to make confessions when they are sick during the trauma of withdrawal.

In the Russian Federation, people who are convicted even of relatively minor offenses, including possession of drugs for personal use, serve disproportionately harsh prison sentences or long periods in pre-trial detention, often in inhuman conditions where basic health, HIV prevention services and drug treatment are unavailable. And then there’s the registry: once registered as drug offenders, people are not only the easiest targets for police abuse, but they go through life with a black mark, a scar that compromises employment and social support. It is no wonder that when faced with a lethal overdose, people who inject drugs, or friends who are with them, may actually fear calling the police or an ambulance for help.

These allegations will of course be denied by the authorities. And after all, I am merely a visiting Commissioner. But I’d like to make something clear. In my time as the UN Envoy on AIDS in Africa, and in the four years since, as Co-Director of the advocacy organization AIDS-Free World, I have learned that what is said by the people living with AIDS, or those who belong to high-risk groups—men who have sex with men, sex workers, injecting drug users, victims of sexual violence—is always, but always, more reliable and more honest than what is heard from governments. And the written and oral submissions we have received at the regional dialogues are, in my submission, absolutely to be believed.

They are often, as was the case in the Eastern European dialogue, incomparably depressing. Imagine taking a child away from its mother solely because she’s a drug user, and possibly HIV-positive. Imagine that the right of the state to remove the child is ordained by law. Is there anyone who can’t see the need for a Commission on HIV and the Law? There have apparently been cases where abortion has been forced for pregnant women who are drug users. In most countries of the world, pregnant women and women who have children are at the head of the line for methadone and other treatments if they need them in order to stabilize their lives, have good outcomes of pregnancy, be good parents.

When you have a conspiracy of hate directed against a vulnerable group, you can almost be certain that they’ll go underground, they won’t get tested, they won’t turn to prevention or treatment or care, and your prevalence rates for AIDS will soar through the roof.

Interestingly, the situation in the Russian Federation also shows both the importance of law on the books and the problem of inadequate implementation of good law. Russia’s 1995 law is a fine example of legislation that lays out extensive protection against discrimination based on HIV status, and a commitment to the provision of health services to people living with HIV. Yet, both WHO and UNAIDS have concluded that although 85% of people living with HIV in the Russian Federation were infected through injection, only 20% of the people receiving antiretroviral therapy are people who use drugs.

That’s quite a policy: first you demonize them, then you let them die.

There is also the question of resources. With the end of financing from the Global Fund, the amount of money available for prevention for injecting drug users is negligible. The NGOs who managed three programs for the Global Fund did the heavy lifting when it came to people who use drugs and are struggling with HIV. What is to become of those programs? How will the gap be filled? There is a huge crisis building in the Russian Federation and it is as though no one wants to acknowledge it until it explodes. One might ask, as so many are asking, where in the world is the Ministry of Health and Social Development? If you want an Achilles Heel, most of the activists will point to the Ministry of Health.

I’ve left a lot out of these remarks. I haven’t raised the drug stock-outs and shortages, the high price of drugs, the terrifying co-infection levels of HIV and TB, the unnerving extent of chronic viral hepatitis B and C, the desperate situation for the prison population, the appalling indifference to drug users who are women and HIV-positive … the list is endless. But I wanted to concentrate, in narrow and focused terms, on the worst aspects of the predicament for injecting drug users overall, in the Russian Federation.

I can’t imagine that any country wants to be known as the only country on the planet where the rate of AIDS infection is sky-rocketing. But that’s what’s happened to Russia. If it is to turn around, then there will have to be a monumental shift in the attitude to injecting drug use and to the laws that do so much damage. Is that possible? I suppose there’s a corollary: if there’s no shift in attitude, and no shift in the laws, Russia faces a looming human catastrophe.

Sincere thanks to Joanne Csete, PhD, Associate Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and member of the Technical Advisory Group to the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, for her significant assistance with the content of this speech.

Download a copy of these remarks (PDF, 180KB)

¹Millennium Development Goal 6 calls on governments to have halted and begun to reverse the spread HIV/AIDS by 2015.

Hormonal Contraceptives and HIV Risk: What does it mean for women living with HIV?

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 11:51:00 -0400

The following press release was issued by the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in response to the news that use of a hormonal contraceptive popular in Africa increases the risk of contracting HIV. For coverage of the original story, see the New York Times story Contraceptive Used in Africa May Double Risk HIV.

Washington, D.C. — Women living with HIV/AIDS are angered, yet energized by recent study findings about hormonal contraceptives and HIV risk. The study, led by Renee Heffron at University of Washington in Seattle, suggested that, where one partner was infected with HIV, the female partners who used hormone-based contraceptive injections (Depo-provera) were twice as likely to acquire and pass on HIV compared to those who used other contraceptives or none at all. Yet, the researchers are unsure of why this increased transmission risk occurs.

It is extremely problematic if injectable hormonal contraceptives are found to help spread HIV. Lillian Mworeko, Regional Coordinator for the International Community of Women Living with HIV Eastern Africa (ICWEA) stated, “Women have found injectables to be incredibly convenient for several reasons. Since you don’t need to take it daily, it decreases the burden of daily medication. The one-time cost of the contraception shot decreases overall expenses. Additionally, the majority of women, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have partners who disapprove of family planning altogether, which renders injectables really helpful in this case.” Gcebile Ndlovu, Regional Coordinator for the International Community of Women Living with HIV Southern Africa (ICWSA) added, “The injectables have been favored by many. It empowers women in the sense that the fear of getting pregnant would be out of mind.” Now, the only realistic family planning method for women may actually worsen the risk of HIV transmission.

However, there is an even more troubling aspect to this news. A concerned woman living with HIV who has been working as an advocate on Sexual Reproductive & Health Rights (SRHR) in South Africa reported, “We have cases of forced contraception in women living with HIV. Sometimes, acceptance of Depo-provera is a condition to access treatment (a dark side of integrating HIV services with family planning services disguised as SRHR services). I am concerned and angry about this news because scientists knew this a long time ago. There was always a link between STIs, diabetes, and Depo-provera because it affects the vaginal lining. Depo-provera’s risks have been on the radar since I got involved with AIDS in 2000, but we were always cautioned to speak softly for fear of upsetting the family planning lobby.” Ndlovu added, “In Swaziland Depo Provera was phased out at Public Health Institutions and a shorter acting injectable, Nur-Isterate, is being used. I am concerned and wonder if networks in these countries mentioned in the study (Botswana, South Africa and Zambia for Southern Africa) had knowledge of what was and is going on or if [Heffron, et al] have gone back to the couples that took part in the study to share the results with them.”

“This study begs the questions, what are the HIV transmission risks of other unexamined forms of hormonal contraceptives. Women have the right to know the potential benefits and risks of all forms of contraception and to make their own informed decisions. However, more research is needed more quickly. Furthermore, those responsible for the production and coerced use of these drugs must be held accountable,” said Beri Hull, Global Advocacy Officer with International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW Global). In the meantime, protections must be put in place so that women have full information about the risks and benefits of current options and can choose between them before the findings are conclusive.

Beyond Depo-provera, a broader concern is the failure to find biomedical interventions that work for women. Ndlovu stated, “To some extent, such research findings keep pushing the blame to women. Could researchers, donors, and pharmaceutical companies focus on what women can use with less hassles and dangers? Where are we with research on microbicides that are safe for women living with HIV?” Male-oriented interventions have had much greater success. For example, research has confirmed that male circumcision reduces HIV transmissions to over 60%, while microbicides are effective only up to less than 40%. Male condoms are cheaply available, yet female condoms are really uncomfortable and frequently unavailable. The Heffron study findings underline the urgent need to understand why this discrepancy persists. Moreover, they fuel the push for multi-purpose microbicides and robust investment in other female-controlled methods.

Follow up to these findings on all fronts is critical. The South African advocate affirmed, “This is an opportunity to call for research and production of safe contraceptives for all women, including women living with HIV. I support calls for further investigation as UNAIDS has said, but Depo-provera should go off the shelves now. There is no need for further research on this aspect. Rather, research should focus on how many women have been potentially infected because of Depo-provera.”

One clear way to work toward safer and more effective female-controlled family planning methods is to meaningfully involve women living with HIV in the UNAIDS and WHO led analysis of this research and upcoming policy development processes. In particular, ICW urges the World Health Organization to meaningfully involve women living with HIV at their meeting of experts and researchers in January 2012 when they discuss the findings in preparation to update global guidance on HIV and contraception use. Certainly, we cannot be angry at the numbers, but we can be angry if the scientific community constantly focuses on the wrong thing because they have not asked women living with HIV what they need and what could work.

The International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW Global) is the only global network by, for, and of women living with HIV. Founded in 1992, we work to increase the visibility of women living with HIV within the global response to HIV and AIDS and to ensure that we are equal partners in all decisions, which impact our lives. ICW Global envisions a world where all women living with HIV know and exercise their rights to health, including sexual and reproductive health, and dignity. Nothing for us without us!

ICW Global: http://www.icwglobal.org/en/

Is there a link between unemployment, disability and HIV?

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:01:00 -0400

In the tenth installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn describes the link between unemployment, disability, and HIV.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

There are so many different disabilities, how can we ever make programs accessible to everyone?

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:54:00 -0400

In the ninth installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn argues that the first step to making programs accessible to all persons with disabilities is a change in attitudes.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

Is a woman with a disability at a higher risk of being raped than a woman without a disability?

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:20:00 -0400

In the eighth installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn discusses the increased risk of sexual violence faced by women with disabilities.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

CDC Report Demonstrates Effects of Stigma and Laws on MSM

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:32:00 -0400

The release by the US Centers for Disease Control of the latest figures for the rate of new HIV infections in the US provides sobering reading and should be instructive for countries like Jamaica which maintain laws against adult consensual same-sex intimacy. Through improved testing methods it has been determined that while the rate of new infections in the US has held steady at about 50,000 each year from 2006-2009, there has been a near 48% increase in new HIV infections among young Black gay and bisexual men. This confirms the vulnerability of marginalized populations to this still incurable disease. The CDC noted the following factors as contributing to the alarming trend: lack of awareness of HIV status; stigma of HIV and of being gay, both of which can deter individuals from seeking preventive services; as well as limited access to healthcare, HIV testing and treatment. It is not coincidental that African-American culture remains largely characterized by a very conservative religious fundamentalist attitude which is highly intolerant of homosexuality.

So, despite the 2003 US supreme court decision which struck down the law criminalizing same-sex intimacy, the taboo against male homosexuality still rages among the black population, driving young gay black men underground, away from effective prevention interventions.

Jamaica’s population and culture mirrors the black American reality in many respects. Our macho culture of "dancehall" juxtaposed against our hyper-religiosity (we have been recognized as having the most churches per square mile) and the structural impediment of our laws against same-sex intimacy creates a volatile mix of intolerance. It is therefore no surprise that a 2009 UNAIDS study found that Jamaican men who have sex with men have an HIV prevalence rate of 32% as against 1.6% in the general population.

A repeal of the Jamaican anti-buggery law will therefore not immediately reduce the rate of new HIV infections. But it is a necessary first step towards addressing our culture of homophobic intolerance and reversing the spread of HIV, especially among the MSM population.

The CDC report, "Estimated HIV Incidence in the United States, 2006-2009," can be accessed here

Do children with disabilities receive the same amount of sexual health education as children without disabilities?

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 10:45:00 -0400

In the seventh installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn addresses the prejudices that lead to inadequate sexual health education for children with disabilities.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

Jamaican Law, Homophobia, and HIV

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:16:00 -0400

The Global Commission on HIV and the Law has been holding a series of regional consultations to interrogate the connection between punitive laws and their impact on the HIV epidemic. The Caribbean leg took place from April 14-15, 2011, and Maurice Tomlinson made the following submission highlighting the nexus between the 147-year-old Jamaican anti-buggery law, the country’s notorious homophobia (measured at 82.2% of the population), and the grossly disproportionate HIV prevalence rate of 32% among Jamaican men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM) as against 1.6% in the general population.

Section 13.1 of the 2004 revision of the Staff Orders for the Jamaican Public Service prohibits discrimination on the grounds of, inter alia, sexual orientation.¹ However, Jamaica’s 1864 colonially-imposed buggery law still criminalizes any form of consensual adult male same-sex intimacy, whether private or public.² The HIV prevalence rate among Jamaican men who have sex with men (MSM) is 32% as against 1.6% in the general population.³ Alternatively, in Cuba, Suriname, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic (Caribbean countries without such legislation), the HIV prevalence among MSM ranges from one to eight per cent. It would be an over-simplification to argue that the presence of Jamaica’s anti-buggery/gross-indecency legislation is the cause of the high HIV prevalence rate among MSM. However, the legislation certainly contributes to the island’s legendary climate of homophobic violence, discrimination, and deep stigma associated with homosexuality that the Jamaican Ministry of Health has acknowledged are among the factors driving the national epidemic.⁴ For example, popular Jamaican dancehall artiste and 2010 Grammy winner, Buju Banton, sang about shooting and killing gays and when challenged about his homophobia he said it was justified under Jamaican law.⁵ The criminalization of male same-sex conduct not only breeds homophobic violence, it also systematically drives Jamaican lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgender and intersex individuals (LGBTI) underground, away from effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support interventions.⁶

The major LGBTI organization on the island, Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), reports that homophobic attacks by state and non-state actors are common. AIDS-Free World is working with J-FLAG to effectively document these attacks. In February, 2011, there were two police raids of gay clubs in Kingston and Montego Bay, and during the Montego Bay raid, heavily armed officers kicked in doors, aggressively accosted patrons, indiscriminately beat and pistol-whipped them and chased everyone from the venue. Throughout the operation the police hurled homophobic slurs encouraging clientele of nearby clubs to join in the melee by throwing bottles, stones and other missiles as individuals fled for their lives. The club served to house many LGBTI who had been evicted from their homes because of their sexual identity, and the major AIDS NGO on the island, Jamaica AIDS Support for Life, regularly used it for HIV outreach. Even though Jamaica does not criminalize same-sex female intimacy, amongst the general population, the belief is that any form of homosexuality is outlawed. The result is that “corrective rapes” of lesbians to make them straight are not uncommon.⁷ There is no record that such rapes have ever been perpetrated with the use of condoms.⁸

The presence of the anti-buggery/gross-indecency law also precludes the distribution of condoms in Jamaican prisons with the result that the HIV prevalence rate among inmates is twice the national average. In 1997, the Commissioner of Corrections, on the advice of his prison doctor, proposed the distribution of condoms in the island’s prisons but was advised that he would be aiding and abetting a criminal offence namely buggery. Condoms thus remain contraband in Jamaica’s prisons although there are reports that prison warders do a thriving business trading in them. Prisoners who can’t afford to pay resort to the use of plastic bags. Jamaica’s supermarkets are now “going green” and will soon cease to distribute this major prophylaxis used by inmates. The result is that the HIV and AIDS prevalence among prisoners is expected to rise. Once they are released, their partners are also at risk, as the Ministry of Health has recorded high levels of unprotected sex and promiscuity among the Jamaican population.

Section 26 (b) of the Jamaican Constitution ”saves” the country’s 1864 anti-buggery law from judicial review, along with all pre-independence laws. Although the Constitution is being reviewed in order to provide for an expanded Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, a savings law clause is being re-inserted with regard to sexual offences. The result is that Jamaican courts will still be precluded from reviewing these laws in line with evolving societal standards and norms. A domestic legal challenge (as happened in India to repeal that country’s anti-sodomy law⁹) is therefore seemingly impossible in Jamaica.

Jamaica’s homophobic laws have been justified by relativist arguments based on Judeo-Christian theology. Notwithstanding the fact that section 21 of the Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion,¹⁰ the very idea that homosexual identity or practice is somehow “non-Christian” demonstrates the unfortunate role that religious leaders have played in perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Cultural arguments are also often used as justification for retaining Jamaica’s homophobic laws. However, as the UN Secretary General reminded the world on World Human Rights Day December 10, 2010, while cultural sensitivities may make it difficult to recognize the human rights of LGBTI, culture must never be used as justification for the denial of fundamental human rights. Finally, some of Jamaica’s elected officials have claimed that they are unable to change Jamaica’s buggery/gross indecency law until “society changes first.” While reasonable people may disagree as to the relationship between laws and attitudes, it is clear that the job of legislators is to ensure that all laws are fair, non-discriminatory, and comport with basic principles of civil and human rights. Jamaica’s legislators have failed to address the fundamentally discriminatory nature of the buggery/gross indecency law by allowing it to stand.

Conclusions
Jamaica’s anti-buggery/gross-indecency law contributes to violence and abuse by police and private citizens of LGBTI citizens. The laws also marginalize LGTI and inhibit them from seeking treatment for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases that increase the risk of HIV transmission. The prevailing association of HIV and AIDS with homosexuality compounds the marginalization of many people living with HIV and AIDS, who face additional stigmatization through the presumption that they have engaged in illegal sex. It also keeps those at highest risk of the disease—including people who do not engage in homosexual sex—from seeking HIV-related information and health services.

Recommendations to the Commission
• Denounce and condemn Jamaica’s anti-buggery/gross-indecency laws;
• Demand that Jamaica ensure that all allegations of excessive use of force and other human rights violations by law enforcement officials based on real or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity or expression are investigated promptly and thoroughly;
• Demand that Jamaica train all law enforcement and criminal justice officials on international human rights standards and nondiscrimination;
• Demand that Jamaica conduct awareness raising programs, especially through the education system, to address social stigma and exclusion of individuals and communities on grounds of their sexual orientation and gender identity and expression; and
• Demand that Jamaica facilitate access to social services, and especially health services, regardless of the individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and/or HIV status.

Download a copy of this paper here (PDF, 152KB)

¹ http://www.moj.gov.jm/pdf/rev_staff_order.pdf, page 80.
² Offences Against the Person Act 1864 s 76 criminalizes anal intercourse; s 77 criminalizes any attempt by males to engage in anal intercourse; and s 79 criminalizes any act of “gross indecency” between men.
³ 2009 UNAIDS report.
⁴ See, e.g., Jamaican Ministry of Health, Jamaica HIV/AIDS/STI National Strategic Plan 2002-2006, January 2002, p. 10; see also Zadie Neufville, “Fear Among Gay Men Said to Fuel HIV/AIDS Cases,” Inter Press Service, March 5, 2002; Garwin Davis, “Homophobia Remains High. Gays Remain in Seclusion, Health Officials Worry,” The Jamaica Gleaner, July 26, 2001.
⁵ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIRmQNM4xUk, accessed March 2, 2011. Other popular Jamaican dancehall artistes are also notorious for their performance of virulently homophobic songs, such as Elephant Man, who justifies the corrective rape of lesbians, Capleton, who invokes the burning of gays, and the group T.O.K., which endorses the stomping and kicking of gays.
⁶ Human Rights Watch interview with Dr. Yitades Gebre, executive director, Ministry of Health Program Coordination Unit, Kingston, June 23, 2004, and Human Rights Watch interview with Dr. Peter Figueroa, chief, Ministry of Health Epidemiology Unit, Kingston, June 23, 2004, demonstrate that providing HIV education and prevention services to men who have sex with men is extremely difficult because they are forced to remain invisible due to prejudice and abuse.
⁷ See Makeda Silvera, “Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians,” Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 521-532 (reporting gang rape of women “suspected” of lesbianism in 1950s Jamaican towns).
⁸ In 2010, J-FLAG received reports of three (3) corrective rapes, two of which occurred within days of each other. In one instance, four men gang-raped a lesbian and used a knife to cut her so she can better “tek man.” In the other instance, the lesbian was savagely raped at gun-point, and then dumped half-naked after her ordeal. Her rapist commented on how “tight” she was and promised that the next time he would use a condom.
⁹ In Naz Foundation v. Government of NCT of Delhi and Others WP(C) No.7455/2001 the High Court of Delhi struck down much of S. 377 of the Indian Penal Code as being unconstitutional. The Court held that to the extent S. 377 criminalised consensual non-vaginal sexual acts between adults, it violated an individual's fundamental rights to equality before the law, freedom from discrimination and to life and personal liberty under Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution of India. Jamaica’s Constitution guarantees similar rights in Article 13.
¹⁰ In September 2010, the Jamaican Prime Minister said at an interview at the United Nations in New York that homosexual acts remain illegal in Jamaica because the country is a Christian country.

Many people are uncomfortable thinking about people with disabilities having sex; how does that affect your work?

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:13:00 -0400

In the sixth installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn addresses the barriers created by the discomfort many people feel when dealing with the sexuality of people with disabilities.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

Can you describe some of the barriers a person with a disability might face if he or she tries to get tested for HIV?

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:50:00 -0400

In the fifth installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn describes the barriers to HIV testing faced by a person with disabilities.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

What is the difference between people with disabilities who become HIV positive and people with HIV who become disabled?

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:49:00 -0400

In the fourth installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn explains the difference between people with disabilities who become HIV-positive and people with HIV who become disabled.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

AIDS-Free World Meets with the Director of UN Women, and Decries the Lack of Funding

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:41:00 -0400

AIDS-Free World’s Co-Directors met for the second time with Dr. Michelle Bachelet on July 14th, 2011, during a series of meetings in Geneva. We were keen to learn how UN Women plans to deal with the paucity of funds allocated to date to UN Women; UN Women reports that it has received pledges of $120 million for core funding. Additional funds have been pledged for earmarked projects, but the core funding remains well short of the annual budget of $500 million that was proposed when UN Women was launched in January, and even further behind the goal of more than $1 billion funding that AIDS-Free World, and other NGOs, have advocated.

Even taking the special earmarked funds into account, the commitment of members states to UN Women remains far from encouraging: member states have committed themselves in principle to the purpose and goals of UN Women, but have for the most part explained the reduced levels of funding as indicative of a pattern. In general, donors have cut their contributions to UN agencies, funds and programs across the board, citing the ongoing global financial crisis as the rationale. We expressed AIDS-Free World’s view that economic hard times do not seem to curtail spending on governments’ strategic interests, or “high priority” initiatives including defense, or on multinational corporations’ commitment to over-compensating those at the top echelons. We stressed, and Madame Bachelet agreed, that shortages of money are relative, and always most pronounced where women are concerned.

We also discussed with Madame Bachelet an imperative that AIDS-Free World considers non-negotiable: UN Women must become a fully functioning member of the UNAIDS committee of co-sponsoring organizations without any further delays.

"At the moment, UN Women is being strangled at birth by a coalition of the wealthy,"

Women and gender have been relegated to the backbenches of the UN system for long enough. The creation of UN Women should have been followed immediately by the new UN entity’s inclusion among the co-sponsoring organizations. Madame Bachelet felt that rules and regulations may mean that it takes a while for UN Women to be accepted among co-sponsors, but AIDS-Free World persisted: membership must be immediate, and unconditional.

AIDS-Free World, a pioneering advocate for the creation of UN Women, has been particularly vocal about the anemic funding for it. In an interview last month with IPS, Co-director Stephen Lewis said total funding raised so far — on the order of $120 million — is "hopelessly, pathetically below what's needed and was expected." (Read the IPS story here.) "I gather that UN Women has now lowered its sights to a target of 250 million dollars. That's a travesty ... barely more than the cumulative total of the four small entities that were rolled into UN Women at its formation," he said.

The four women's entities that were folded into UNW were: the U.N. Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM); the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues; the U.N. Division for the Advancement of Women; and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW).

"At the moment, UN Women is being strangled at birth by a coalition of the wealthy," said Lewis, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations. "All the misogynist countries, from Pakistan to Sudan, must surely be laughing behind the scenes. They never wanted UN Women and now the Western donors are doing the dirty work for them," he said. "It's an ugly business and shows, yet again, that when it comes to women, the U.N. can never get its act together," declared Lewis.

"As always, we and others will give Michelle Bachelet the benefit of the doubt. She's quite superb as an under-secretary-general (USG, the rank she holds in the U.N. hierarchy)," he added. "But even Michelle Bachelet cannot change the world for women without the resources to do so."

What They Say... And What They Do

“We must declare with one voice that women’s progress is human progress, and human progress is women’s progress once and for all…. This isn’t window dressing, and it’s not just good politics. President Obama and I believe that the subjugation of women is a threat to the national security of the United States. It is also a threat to the common security of our world, because the suffering and denial of the rights of women and the instability of nations go hand in hand.” — Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State of the United States, March 12, 2010

“It is not enough simply to state our principles and our commitments. We must also implement them. UN Women must make tangible improvement in women’s lives, especially by helping to provide essential services in developing nations…. More can and should be done to ensure that UN Women has the resources it needs to meet its ambitious mandate.” — Ambassador Susan Rice, United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, June 27, 2011

"Gender equality and women’s empowerment are fundamental to the global mission of the United Nations to achieve equal rights and dignity for all... But equality for women and girls is also an economic and social imperative. Until women and girls are liberated from poverty and injustice, all our goals — peace, security, sustainable development — stand in jeopardy." — United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, March 8, 2010

“The UK has also played a leadership role in the establishment of UN Women, the new organisation dedicated to gender equality, which we will support once we see a copy of their strategic plan. We are deeply committed to help it become a powerful agency.” —Andrew Mitchell, United Kingdom's Secretary of State for International Development, March 8, 2011

Sources

UN Women funding: '2011 Pledges and Contributions to UN Women Core Resources as of 6 July.' http://www.unwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/2011_pledges_UN_Women_core_resources.pdf; UNICEF funding: UNICEF, 'Annual Report 2010.' http://www.unicef.org/publications/index_58840.html; U.S. Department of Defense Budget, Fiscal Year 2010: “Military personnel programs,” http://comptroller.defense.gov/budget2010.html; U.S. Department of Interior budget, 2012: “Youth in the Great Outdoors”, DH-79, 2011; U.S. Department of State budget, Fiscal Year 2010: “The budget in brief."; Cosmetic surgery: American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, Statistics 2010.; EU parliament: “A parliament on the move” www.nytimes.com/2011/06/29/world/europe/29strasbourg.html; Cleveland municipal budget: City of Cleveland 2011 Budget Book.; Mattel profits: Los Angeles Times, “Mattel reports strong profits,” Feb 3, 2011, articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/03/business/la-fi-mattel-earnings-20110202;Chicago Cubs payroll: 'Chicago Cubs Salary/Payroll Information 2011.' http://espn.go.com/mlb/team/salaries/_/name/chc/chicago-cubs

Is AIDS and Disability just a problem in Africa?

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:49:00 -0400

In the third installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn explains why the connections between AIDS and disability must be addressed around the world, not just in Africa.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

What Is the Difference Between "Impairment" and "Disability"?

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:48:00 -0400

In the second installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn explains the difference between "impairment" and "disability."

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

Why Is It Important for Us to Talk About AIDS and Disability Together?

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:47:00 -0400

In the first installment of our series of videos on AIDS and disability, AIDS-Free World's Advisor on Disability and AIDS Myroslava Tataryn explains the connections between HIV and AIDS and disability.

View other videos by Myroslava on AIDS and disability here.

Drawing the Links Between Disability and AIDS

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:43:00 -0400

Questions around sexuality and disability have been silenced for years. People with disabilities continue to be protrayed as asexual, hyper-sexual or just down-right unattractive. Anything except for human beings with the same variety of sexual attractions as any other humans regardless of perceived ability. In the context of HIV/AIDS this silence can be deadly. As part of our ongoing committment to advocating for the inclusion of disability rights in global AIDS discourse and programs, AIDS-Free World wants to ask those questions about disability and sexuality that, as a society, we may often be afraid to ask. We aim to update this site weekly with new discussions with our Advisor on Disability and AIDS, Myroslava Tataryn. Should you have questions that you would like to ask Myroslava as part of this discussion please email us at mt@aidsfreeworld.org.

Question 1: Why is it important for us to talk about AIDS and disability together?

Question 2: What is the difference between "disability" and "impairment"?

Question 3: Is AIDS and disability just a problem in Africa?

Question 4: What is the difference between people with disabilities who become HIV-positive and people with HIV who become disabled?

Question 5: Can you describe some of the barriers a person with a disability might face if he or she tries to get tested for HIV?

Question 6: Many people are uncomfortable thinking about people with disabilities having sex; how does that affect your work?

Question 7: Do children with disabilities receive the same amount of sexual health education as children without disabilities?

Question 8: Is a woman with a disability at a higher risk of being raped than a woman without a disability?

Question 9: There are so many different disabilities, how can we ever make programs accessible to everyone?

Question 10: Is there a link between unemployment, disability and HIV?

National Survey of Attitudes and Perceptions of Jamaicans Towards Same Sex Relationships

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:08:00 -0400

As part of our continuing advocacy in Jamaica and the Caribbean for the repeal of laws criminalizing homosexuality and tolerance for all sexualities, AIDS-Free World helped fund this survey , conducted by a research team at the University of the West Indies at Mona, of national attitudes in Jamaica towards homosexuality and same-sex relationships. The executive summary of the report is included below. The full report an be downloaded here (PDF, 791KB).

National Survey of Attitudes and Perceptions of Jamaicans Towards Same-Sex Relationships
This report examines Jamaican views towards homosexuality and attempts to discover what are some possible determinants of attitudes towards homosexuality in the country. This study uses a mixed method approach driven largely by a nation poll of attitudes and perceptions. For the survey, a nationally representative sample of 1007 adults from 231 communities across Jamaica was interviewed between October and November 2010. The margin of error is approximately +/- 4%. The survey was supported by a qualitative study based on five focus groups conducted across the country between October 2010 and January 2011. Following is a summary of findings from the study.

1. It would appear that Jamaicans become aware of homosexuality at an early stage in their lives as the majority of the respondents (51%) indicated knowing about homosexuality at 14 years old and under.

2. Most Jamaicans (89%) believe that homosexuality is somewhat or very prevalent in Jamaica. Respondents also alluded to an association with this orientation and one’s social class, as 66.8% felt that is was more prevalent among some social classes more than others. A significant 57.7% felt that it was most prevalent among the upper class, while 9% said it was most among the middle class and another 2% said it was most among the working class.
3. Most persons (51%) felt that homosexuality was to be found equally among males and females, however, 32% felt that it was more common among males and 11.2% stated that it was slightly more common among females.

4. With respect to the causes of homosexuality, opinions varied. Only 10% felt that persons are born as homosexuals, however 28.6% felt that it was due to environmental factors – social and cultural. The largest proportion felt that it was due to a combination of factors, suggesting the interaction of nature and nurture.

5. Most Jamaicans (56%) believe that it is not possible to be a homosexual and be religious at the same time. However, it should be noted that a significant minority (43%) does not share this view, which perhaps suggest that the public is somewhat conflicted on the issue of homosexuality and religiosity.

6. When asked if one can be homosexual and also be a Christian, only 30% agreed with the statement.

7. Most respondents agreed that society was more accepting of female homosexuality (67.1%) and that this was the case because women can do things men cannot do whilst suffering few negative consequences. Also, female homosexuality is rarely considered to be bad or wrong (13%).

8. Most respondents (85.2%) did not think that homosexuality among consenting adults should be made legal in Jamaica.

9. In relation to male homosexuality, 82.2% deemed it to be morally wrong as opposed to 3.6% who did not see it as a moral issue. 6.2% of those polled had no opinion on the matter. As for female homosexuality, the results were similar as 75.2% felt that homosexuality was morally wrong.

10. Two homophobia scales indicate that Jamaicans have strong negative views of homosexuality, thereby ranking high on these scales.

11. Negative views of homosexuality tended to be greatest among males, non- university educated persons, those who listened mostly to dancehall and reggae music and those in lower socio-economic groups.

12. In general, the most important finding from this study is that strong negative perceptions and attitudes towards homosexuality cut across all social classes, gender and social groups in Jamaica.

Download a copy of the full report here (PDF, 791KB).

Kenyan Conference Brings Legal, Activist, Governmental, Medical Practitioners Together to Improve Accountability for Sexual Violence Crimes

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop 2011

Survivor of rape, Zimbabwe, 2008. Read AIDS-Free World's
report on sexual violence in Zimbabwe here.

Kenyan government officials, Kenyan NGOs, and lawyers and activists from Liberia, Zambia, and the U.S., along with AIDS-Free World and the Berkeley Human Rights Center, will come together on May 25-27 to examine how to improve the Kenyan response to violent sexual crime, including in times of emergency.

“The Kenyan 2007 elections featured a horrific amount of systematic rape used as a political tool to punish people for their political choices. Sexual violence against women in daily life is also a major problem in Kenya, and we wanted to work with Kenyan groups to assess the Kenyan legal system’s capacity to protect women who might testify in prosecutions, if only they felt safe enough to do so,” noted Betsy Apple, AIDS-Free World’s Legal Director. One of the topics for discussion at the conference is victim and witness protection in the context of sexual violence, which presents particular challenges, as such programs must address the comprehensive needs of traumatized and possibly ill victims. Other issues include investigations, prosecutions, sexual violence and children, and medical and psycho-social support.

AIDS-Free World recognized the huge impediment that safety concerns presented to prosecutions of sexual crimes in its work documenting politically motivated rape in Zimbabwe around the 2008 elections in that country. “We interviewed more than eighty women from Zimbabwe who had been raped around the elections, and almost to a person, they described their terror about coming forward due to fear of reprisals from their perpetrators as well as concern about the stigma they would face from their communities,” said Shonali Shome, AIDS-Free World’s Legal and Gender Advisor. “This overwhelming fright convinced us that, without effective witness protection programs, legal accountability for sexual violence is impossible,” Shome added.

The Victim and Witness Protection panel will present Alice Ondieki, head of Kenya’s Witness Protection program; Felicia Coleman, Chief Prosecutor in the Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Unit in Liberia’s Ministry of Justice; Deweh Grey, Commissioner at the Law Reform Commission of Liberia; Judy Gitau, Programme Officer of the International Commission of Jurists; and AIDS-Free World’s Betsy Apple.

The Kenyan conference will be the first time a diverse range of actors — government officials, lawyers, activists, doctors, Kenyan service providers, and those working on sexual violence in other countries — come together in one place to assess Kenyan accountability efforts for sexual crimes. “We think this is a really exciting moment — especially in the wake of the new Constitution in Kenya and all the accompanying reforms — to refocus on how, together, we can work for justice for some of Kenya’s most invisible and vulnerable survivors,” said Apple.

Read the press release on the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop

Read AIDS-Free World's report on victim and witness protection

View the program for the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop (PDF, 292KB)

Safety Denied: Victim and Witness Protection in Sexual Violence Cases

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop 2011

This paper is the culmination of a research collaboration between AIDS-Free World and the International Justice Clinic of the UCLA School of Law. The paper maps existing victim and witness protection practices in order to identify challenges, strengths, and essential constituent parts of effective witness protection for sexual violence victims. It provides a background for AIDS-Free World's panel on victim and witness protection at the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop being held in Naivasha, Kenya. The introduction to the paper is below, and the full paper can be downloaded here (PDF, 544KB).

During armed conflict or political instability, or in their aftermath, the pathway from sexual violence to a perpetrator’s punishment is often strewn with barriers, leaving the victim subject to threats, emotional trauma, and physical ailments long after the initial crime. The country in which the conflict occurred may lack the full or appropriate legal and forensic tools to investigate and prosecute the crime. Social and cultural prejudices often implicate the victim in the cruelty done to her. Infrastructure — from courtrooms to prisons, from hospitals to safe houses — may be inadequate or even nonexistent, or it may compromise victim security and privacy. Law enforcement and other actors in the justice sector regularly lack requisite training, or there may simply be too few professionals to conduct investigations and try cases. Communities seeking to rebuild after violence rarely prioritize vindication of the rights of women, sexual violence’s chief victims. Political leaders often do not see sexual violence as a major crime, or worse, they may deploy such violence as a tool against their adversaries. As a consequence, governments in conflict often do not punish perpetrators of sexual violence, leaving victims at risk of further harm and fueling the rise of such criminality.

By contrast, an effective criminal process transforms the survivor from victim into protected participant, a witness, in the search for justice and accountability. But a system suffering from legal, social, infrastructure, and political impediments discourages the victim from reporting the crime, speaking to investigators and testifying in court. Perversely, these barriers protect perpetrators and facilitate further violence (and the scourges associated with sexual violence, such as high HIV infection rates, persistent gender inequality, and claims for retribution). They make it nearly impossible to know the extent of the crimes and to have appropriate data with which to address them. Societies determined to confront sexual violence need to address this fundamental question: How can they create safe space for the victim to participate in the process of accountability? How can they tear down the barriers of prejudice, incapacity, and political aversion that stand in the way of victims coming forward? In short, what are the fundamental elements of witness protection in sexual violence cases? These are the questions at the heart of this report.

Witness protection programs serve many purposes. They provide opportunities for victims to participate in a criminal process. They offer the hope of accountability. They give threatened witnesses a way to seek shelter far from the scene of their victimization. Witness protection also provides a space in which individual traumas may be treated, enabling a victim to move into a position with more control over her own life. Even beyond the specific protection of witnesses in criminal trial, a protection program can beneficially address other social ills. Take, for instance, exposure to HIV. A number of high HIV burdened countries are the sites of armed or political conflict. Even in countries with low HIV prevalence rates, sexual violence is a critical driver of HIV, as it renders its victims more susceptible to HIV than consensual sex. Unprotected sex carries a risk under any conditions, but the risk intensifies when sex is forced, as the resulting cuts and abrasions increase the likelihood of HIV transmission if the aggressor is HIV‐positive. Girls are at exceptionally high risk of contracting HIV through rape because their genital tracts, not fully mature, are particularly vulnerable to abrasions that allow the virus to enter the body. For those victims who are HIV‐positive, rape by an HIV+ perpetrator may cause re‐ infection, which further compromises their immune systems.

An effective witness protection program should ensure access to HIV testing and, in the event of a positive result, treatment, as well as services that would enable compliance with a treatment regime dependent upon regular food, consistent medication, rest, and access to medical professionals. Victims who know or suspect that the perpetrators of sexual violence have infected them with HIV bear a double stigma: that of sexual violence victim, and of person with HIV/AIDS. The stigma is so powerful that the women are often left to choose between justice and community. Most women end up remaining within their communities, but at a tremendous cost. As an activist working in a Kenyan NGO has said, “There are many reasons to remain silent.” Effective and comprehensive witness protection programs that provide access to justice as well as to crucial psychological and medical services help challenge the impunity that makes ongoing sexual violence — and, therefore, a further spread of HIV — inevitable.

II.

This report is the culmination of research in which AIDS‐Free World commissioned the International Justice Clinic of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Law School to explore the challenges of witness protection in sexual violence cases in the context of armed and political conflict. AIDS‐Free World asked UCLA law students to map existing victim/witness protection practices in order to identify challenges, strengths, and essential constituent parts of effective witness protection for sexual violence victims. AIDS‐Free World intended (and intends) to utilize this research to inform its ongoing project on legal accountability for sexual violence, and to enable it ultimately to advocate for strengthened victim/witness protection.

Working with UCLA Law School Professor David Kaye, UCLA law students first researched and identified several “case studies,” including victim/witness programs in Colombia, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, all of which were countries selected for their history and ongoing problems with crimes of sexual violence, both international and domestic, as well as concerns about the spread of HIV. Additionally, students examined the witness protection programs at the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Special Court for Lebanon (SCL), and the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) on the premise that these programs, given their experience and resources, might offer useful insights. Carey James, Jacob Mutert, and Jaimie Thomas researched the programs in the international tribunals in The Hague; Priyan Chandraratna, Farnoosh Hashemian, and Nicolle Kownacki examined programs in Colombia; Leila Moshref and Mary Tanagho looked at victim/witness protection in Liberia; Aleta Sprague and Taylor Vernon conducted research on Sierra Leone initiatives; and Keiara Auzenne and Vanessa Baehr‐Jones Vanessa undertook general research. The researchers conducted dozens of interviews with court officials, prosecutors, witness protection officers, lawyers, activists, and other civil society representatives in Bogota, Monrovia, Freetown, and The Hague, as well as undertook extensive research examining court documents and decisions, NGO reports, and other relevant materials.

This report first examines how witness protection operates at the international level, primarily at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Second, it presents three cases studies in order to detail the kinds of challenges witness protection faces in post‐conflict and ongoing conflict situations. Colombia, Sierra Leone and Liberia present vastly different experiences from international practice. For instance, witness protection at the ICC generally occurs in the context of efforts to hold senior officials responsible for the crimes of their subordinates, which is often very different from accountability for specific, lower‐ranking perpetrators at the national level. Further, witness protection at the international level involves resources and funding that exceed the capabilities of many national programs. Still, the kinds of protections that must be offered to victim/witnesses are similar across the case studies—physical protection from further harm and retribution, psycho‐social and medical support for those who participate in the criminal process, education of the wider community to tear down common prejudices that lead to further harm and impunity. This report aims to highlight the challenges in establishing effective witness protection programs while identifying questions for ongoing consideration and research.

This report suggests that governments must establish effective witness protection programs if they are genuinely committed ending impunity for sexual violence. In particular, the following elements require further investigation:

• Law: Deficits in legislation vary from country to country, when it comes to the law necessary to protect witnesses. In some situations — such as observed in Sierra Leone and Liberia — national laws clash with traditional law, in which case accountability may be secondary to reconciliation in the community or between families of perpetrator and victim. Others lack the law necessary to investigate and prosecute crimes of sexual violence. In still other situations, such as observed in Colombia, the law provides for investigation and prosecution, but isn’t actually utilized to prosecute sexual crimes when other crimes, especially murder, are taken more seriously. The lack of prosecution of sexual violence undermines witness and victim security, leaving perpetrators free to continue to commit more crimes.

• Infrastructure: Basic elements of legal infrastructure are missing in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Courts often leave witnesses minimally protected, their identities subject to disclosure. The prisons are ineffective at holding perpetrators, who may easily escape. Few safe houses exist to provide havens for those who wish to testify against their perpetrators. Too few trained judges, prosecutors, and private lawyers exist to try cases of sexual violence in a timely fashion. Any viable infrastructure is often distant from villages where such violence occurs. Few medical professionals and psychologists exist to provide essential services.

• Psychosocial and medical support: One of the areas in which international tribunals excel is the kind of support provided by trained psychologists with specializations in vulnerable populations. Protection involves not only physical protection but also treatment for the kinds of recurrent emotional and physical harms that often come from the trauma of sexual violence. This level of psychosocial and medical support is typically unavailable in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Colombia.

• Education and outreach: Research thus far indicates that victim/witness protection depends not only on the mechanical aspects of courts and other facilities, but also on the existence of communities that support accountability for sexual violence. Widespread prejudice against victims of sexual violence leads to stigma and physical harm. Programs to support witnesses, even if they function effectively, will operate in a vacuum if the entire community is not engaged promote a broader understanding of why accountability for sexual violence is critical to ending it.

Download the full report Safety Denied: Victim and Witness Protection in Sexual Violence Cases here (PDF, 544KB)

Read the press release on the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop

View the program for the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop (PDF, 292KB)

Seeking Justice for Sexual Violence in Kenya

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop 2011

Sexual violence is both a manifestation of gendered discrimination and a criminal act. Particularly when it is widespread or systematic, sexual violence undermines the response to HIV at the same time that it accelerates its transmission. By addressing widespread sexual violence through high-level advocacy, including targeted legal strategies, AIDS-Free World works to support women’s rights and to end the spread of HIV.

Legal accountability is a decisive tool in the struggle to redress systematic sexual violence and to prevent its escalation. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) has an important role to play in prosecuting the worst crimes of sexual violence, it lacks the capacity and the mandate to address every situation in which widespread sexual violence is perpetrated. Therefore, it is critical for domestic courts to address sexual crimes committed in their own countries. Numerous hurdles to successful prosecutions exist, but a chief barrier is the legitimate fear that many victims experience: fear of stigmatization, fear of being asked to relive a brutal event without emotional support, and fear of reprisals by the perpetrators themselves, so often living in the same communities as the victims. Without the willingness of victims to assist in the prosecutions of their perpetrators, legal accountability is impossible; the path to accountability, thus, requires comprehensive victim and witness protection services.

AIDS-Free World’s interest in victim and witness protection emerged out of our work documenting politically motivated rape in Zimbabwe and seeking legal accountability for its perpetrators. AIDS-Free World has also been working for the past nine months with the International Justice Clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Law School to research victim and witness protection in three case study countries — Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Colombia — as well as at the international tribunals in The Hague. This focus on legal accountability for sexual violence also led us to look at victim and witness protection in Kenya, where election-related violence in 2007 - 2008 included many rapes. Partnering with the Berkeley Human Rights Center (BHRC), and in conjunction with a wide range of Kenyan NGOs, we undertook to convene a conference in Kenya on sexual violence and prosecution. A Steering Committee was formed, consisting of Kenya's Sexual Offenses Act Task Force, FIDA-Kenya, Liverpool VCT, Center for Rights Education and Awareness (CREAW), the Coalition on Violence Against Women (COVAW), and ICJ-Kenya, as well as the Berkeley Human Rights Center and AIDS-Free World.

The conference, The Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop, to be held May 25-27, 2011, in Naivasha, Kenya, will address various aspects of Kenya’s capacity to address sexual violence crimes by examining the strengths and weaknesses of relevant legislation, programs, policies, and institutions — legal, medical, and psychosocial. AIDS-Free World, as one of the conference’s co-conveners, has organized a Victim and Witness Protection track of the conference, and will present a panel on Victim and Witness Protection. The Liberia/ Sierra Leone/ Colombia case-study research on victim and witness protection, conducted by AIDS-Free World lawyers, a dozen law students, and a UCLA law professor, will be presented at this panel.

Read the press release on the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop

View the program for the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop (PDF, 292KB)

Sexual Offenses Act Implementation Workshop 2011

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop 2011

Kenya’s Task Force on the Implementation of the Sexual Offences Act and the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, with critical support from OSI, GIZ, FIDA-Kenya, LVCT, and AIDS-Free World, will convene a workshop from May 25-27, 2011 to help assess Kenya’s capacity to address sexual violence and improve implementation of its 2006 Sexual Offences Act.

Why Convene a Workshop?
Implementation of the 2006 Sexual Offences Act (SOA) remains weak in Kenya. In addition to building outreach, investigations, prosecution, witness protection, and medical / psychosocial support capacities, Kenyan stakeholders from all sectors emphasize the need for better coordination at policy and programmatic levels. Response to violent crime – including systematic violence in times of emergency – must also be improved. Finally, the SOA must be now be effectuated in accordance with Kenya’s new Constitution. Since 2007, the Task Force on the Implementation of the Sexual Offences Act has been charged with ensuring the SOA’s protections are realized – and such a task must be undertaken with the support and coordination of both government and civil society. This Workshop will provide a national, multi-sectoral forum to support the Task Force in fulfilling its mandate.

What Key Issues Will the Workshop Address?
• Progress and challenges in all sectors responding to sexual and gender-based violence;

• Implications of the new Constitution for SOA implementation;

• Challenges in SOA-related investigation, prosecution, and adjudication; • Disconnects between Kenya’s medical and legal systems;

• The necessity of witness protection and psychosocial care for victims; • Creative community approaches, including media, technology, and informal justice systems;

• SOA-based protection for vulnerable groups; • Relationship between the SOA and the 2008 International Crimes Act.

What Are the Objectives of the Workshop?
• To facilitate progress report and stakeholder feedback about ongoing SOA challenges; • To strengthen connections among medical, legal, law enforcement, and community sectors; • To identify key breakages in support and accountability mechanisms and prioritize action items for 2011-2012;

• To explore strategies to improve accountability for both SOA violations and mass, politically-motivated sex crimes committed in Kenya;

• To learn from the relevant experience of regional and local experts; • To foster information-sharing and create a databank of resources on sexual offences in Kenya that can be accessed after the Workshop; • To produce a post-workshop report, detailing session discussions and clearly outlining
priority Action Items for specific participant follow-through.

For more information, please contact Kim Thuy Seelinger (ktseelinger@berkeley.edu), Carol Ajema (c_ajema@liverpoolvct.org), or Mariam Kamunyu (soaworkshop@gmail.com).

Sponsors
Task Force on the Implementation of the SOA
Human Rights Center
FIDA-Kenya
Liverpool VCT
AIDS-Free World
Open Society Institute
GIZ

Steering Committee
Task Force on the Implementation of the SOA
Human Rights Center
FIDA-Kenya
Liverpool VCT
AIDS-Free World
Center for Rights Education and Awareness
Coalition on Violence Against Women
ICJ

Download a copy of this press release (PDF, 242KB).

View the program of the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop (PDF, 292KB)

AIDS-Free World's Panel on Witness Protection and Support

Fri, 20 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop 2011

As a co-sponsor of the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop, AIDS-Free World organized and provided financial support for the Victim and Witness Protection track. We have assembled a panel of high-level experts from Kenya, Liberia and the United States to discuss victim and witness protection specifically for rape victims. In the session we hope to explore some of the following questions: Why is it so important to ensure victim and witness protection for victims of rape? What countries, if any, have strong protection programs in place, or elements of strong protection programs? What is required to operationalize a witness protection program? What are the challenges? What kind of legislation is required to create strong national witness protection programs? What specific considerations should be taken for rape victims within witness protection programs? What kind of model witness protection program for rape victims might be proposed? The session will include speakers from Kenya, Liberia, and the United States, and will be chaired by Judy Gitau, a lawyer who helped to develop Kenya’s Witness Protection Act.

Panel Participants and Organizers

Betsy Apple has diverse experience as an international human rights lawyer, focusing on issues at the intersection of human rights, gender justice, environmental abuses, and public health. Before joining AIDS-Free World, she was the director of the Crimes Against Humanity program at Human Rights First; the deputy director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization; and the legal director of EarthRights International, in Thailand and the US, where she focused on corporate accountability for human rights and environmental violations. Ms. Apple has served as legal consultant to Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Clinic, Refugees International, and the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. She currently teaches International Human Rights Law at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

Felicia Coleman is the Chief Prosecutor in the Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Unit in Liberia’s Ministry of Justice. She prosecutes all sexual violence cases within her county, including appeals at the Supreme Court, and advises the Ministry of Justice on how to best address sexual violence. Counsellor Coleman coordinates with the Liberia National Police in investigating for the prosecution of sexual offenses, and she trains prosecutors, health workers, investigators and counselors on sexual violence issues. She has previously served as a criminal court judge and as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of Liberia. She is formally trained as a lawyer, arbitrator, mediator, and nurse.

Judy Gitau is the Programme Officer for the International Cooperation Programme of the Kenya Section of the International Commission of Jurists. She is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya and associate member to the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators. She was part of the working group that critiqued and helped develop the Witness Protection Amendment Act 2010.

Deweh Gray is a Counsellor-at-Law of the Supreme Court Bar of the Republic of Liberia and presently a Commissioner at the Law Reform Commission of Liberia. Prior to occupying this position, she served as President of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia (AFELL). As the head of AFELL, Counsellor Gray supervised a Danish funded project that saw the establishment and outfitting of a specialized court to specifically handle sexual offense cases. The first of its kind in Liberia, this court seeks to protect victims, especially vulnerable witnesses, during trials. She has also trained urban and rural women to provide counseling and direction to their community members on issues surrounding sexual violence and accessing the justice system. During her tenure as head of AFELL she assisted in the prosecution of rape cases, which included the relocation of victims while they underwent trial.

Alice Ondieki is a gender and women’s rights specialist currently serving as the Acting Director of Kenya’s Witness Protection Agency. She is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya with 20 years post-qualification experience in legal practice. Prior to directing the Witness Protection Agency, Ms. Ondieki was Deputy Prosecution Counsel in charge of the Sexual Offences and Victim’s Rights Section of the DPP. She holds a Bachelor and Master of Laws from the University of Nairobi and a Masters in Women’s Law from the University of Zimbabwe.

Shonali Shome is the Legal and Gender Advisor for AIDS-Free World. She received her JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was selected to be a Public Interest Law Scholar andparticipate in a three-year mentoring, education and service program focused on social justice. She has provided legal services to women fleeing gender-based crimes through her work with the Tahirih Justice Center, Georgetown's asylum clinic, and the Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons at Global Rights. She currently serves on the board of Women Organized to Respond to Life-threatening Disease (WORLD), an HIV/AIDS organization based in Oakland, California, and is an adjunct professor at the University of San Francisco's School of Education, where she teaches Human Rights Law.

Read AIDS-Free World's report on victim and witness protection

View the program for the Sexual Offences Act Implementation Workshop (PDF, 292KB)

A Letter to the African Union and the Commonwealth Following the Murder of David Kato

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

H.E. Dr. Jean Ping
Chairperson
African Union Commission
African Union Headquarters
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Mr. Kamalesh Sharma
Secretary-General

Commonwealth Secretariat
Marlborough House, Pall Mall
London, United Kingdom SW1Y 5HX

Excellencies:

In late December 2010 and early January 2011 we sent urgent letters to you and all the leaders of the AU and the Commonwealth alerting you to a wave of virulent homophobia spreading across the African continent and the Commonwealth countries.  We insisted then that attention be paid immediately to this dangerous contagion which threatens the lives of ordinary Africans. Tragically, our predictions were realized when on Wednesday, January 26, 2011 depraved murderers entered the home of Ugandan LGBT activist David Kato and used a hammer to savagely beat him over the head, resulting in his untimely death.  David’s murder was totally avoidable if only the leaders of the AU and the Commonwealth had collectively condemned the incipient hate being spread by Western evangelicals and others against the marginalized and vulnerable LGBT community in Africa, and had taken action to stop it.

David’s murder comes on the heels of very public death threats which he and other Ugandans received after their court victory securing an injunction against the ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine for publishing their pictures under the inflammatory headline, ‘Hang them, they are after our kids!’

In the face of such clear incitement to violence, there was no outcry or condemnation by either of you or any elected leader in the AU or the Commonwealth. The result is that David’s family, friends and the entire world have lost a kind, loving, principled and courageous human being.  Further, many of David’s colleagues now live in fear of similar acts of cowardice and barbarism being perpetrated against them.

Everyone who holds a leadership position in the AU or the Commonwealth but refused to exercise that leadership, contributing instead to the collective silence, should feel an enormous burden of guilt over the news of David's murder. All who have been silent are complicit in the needless infection and death of large numbers of Africans who are driven underground by stigma and discrimination, away from effective HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment and care interventions.

We again remind you that African homophobia is a Western imposition, along with the largely colonial laws which institutionalized it.  We therefore repeat our demand that Africa and the Commonwealth reject this irrational fear of our fellow human beings. Confronting homophobia must go to the top of the agenda of the next African Union Summit and the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Respectfully,

Paula Donovan, Stephen Lewis
Co-Directors, AIDS-Free World

AIDS-Free World Urges the Commonwealth to End Its Silence on Homophobia

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Mr. Kamalesh Sharma
Secretary-General
Commonwealth Secretariat
Marlborough House, Pall Mall
London SW1Y 5HX
United Kingdom

Dear Secretary-General:

At this year's Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Australia, we urge you to put the scourge of homophobia that continues to haunt the Commonwealth high on the agenda. It must have a formal debate in plenary session.

During the last CHOGM gathering in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad in 2009, many non-governmental organizations in attendance called for attention to be paid to the issue of homophobia in the Commonwealth and its deleterious impact on the spread of HIV and AIDS. Civil society recognized the imperative that homophobia be addressed within the Commonwealth because of its symbiotic relationship with HIV. It is a tragic fact, for example, that men who have sex with men have a 42 percent HIV prevalence rate in Kenya, the highest rate among this vulnerable population in any country. It has been well documented that wherever they exist, draconian homophobic laws drive gays underground, away from effective HIV prevention, treatment, care and support interventions.

There was a defiant silence on the issue of homophobia at the last CHOGM gathering, reflecting a most disheartening glimpse into the dominant prejudice that still pervades many Commonwealth states and characterizes those countries’ leaders. Yet, at the close of that gathering, the Heads of Government unanimously adopted the "Affirmation of Commonwealth Values and Principles." Article 5 of this document recalls the collective:

"…belief that equality and respect for protection and promotion of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights for all without discrimination on any grounds, including the right to development, are foundations of peaceful, just and stable societies, and that these rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated and cannot be implemented electively."

The strong commitments to human rights and equality enunciated in this article do not find resonance in all parts of the Commonwealth. Indeed, since the last gathering, homophobic political rhetoric and public practice have continued unabated.

Commonwealth countries located in the Caribbean and Africa have seen some of the most egregious breaches of the fundamental human rights of their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) citizens. In 2009, police in Guyana detained eight people under Chapter 8:02 of the Laws of Guyana, section 153 (1) (xlvii) of the Summary Jurisdiction (Offences) Act, which criminalizes the “wearing of female attire by man; wearing of male attire by women.” Also in that year, the principal of a fundamentalist school in Belize denied a student, Jose Garcia, access to the school because of his sexual orientation and gender identity. From Jamaica, there have been reports of sexual assaults known by the odious term ‘corrective rapes’ of lesbians, the murder of a cross-dresser, home invasions of gays and extortion, blackmail and violent abuse of LGBT.

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Hurting the Tourist Industry

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

A letter by Maurice Tomlinson to the Jamaica Observer.

Dear Editor,

In an effort to escape the bitter winter snowstorm which pummelled Eastern Canada in December, a white Canadian police officer visited Montego Bay over the long Christmas weekend. Even the cold front which Jamaica experienced with temperatures in the 20s was balmy weather for this officer and so he decided to visit the beach on December 27, 2010.

With a black Jamaican man as his guide, the officer settled on the quieter "old hospital" beach site as the other local beaches were packed with holiday bathers. When they entered the beach, they were shocked to hear someone say, "Here come the gays" and a male voice shouting, "Bullet, bullet."

The message the cop left with was that two men cannot walk on the beach in Jamaica without being suspected of being gays and possibly exposed to a violent homophobic slur attack. As the Canadian Consulate in Montego Bay was closed for the holidays, the officer reported the matter to JFLAG.

The government has declared its intention to tap the Canadian market for tourists. However, this incident clearly demonstrates that much work is needed to prepare the Jamaican people to receive more Canadians. Such intolerance and homophobia will not be accepted by Canadians, gay or straight, and will certainly scuttle the government's well laid tourism plans. Simply put, the Jamaican government must emphasise tolerance or jeopardise the vital tourism "cash-cow".

Maurice Tomlinson

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UN Women's First Hurdle: Educating Ban Ki-moon

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:56:00 -0500

Dr. Michelle Bachelet
Under Secretary-General
UN Women
304 East 45th Street
15th Floor
New York, NY 10017
United States

An open letter

Can we help with your biggest challenge: educating the Secretary-General?

Dear Dr. Bachelet:

On this, the first working week of UN Women, we write to wish you every possible success. It's a huge task to launch the first new UN agency in decades, but as we told you in our recent meeting, we have great confidence in your distinguished leadership.

The greatest challenges will come from within. And that was demonstrated yesterday, right at the outset of your tenure, by a classic act of unthinking negligence on the part of the Secretary-General himself. Alas, it is all too typical.

In yesterday's issue of UN Wire, the lead story was titled "Ban Ki-moon expounds on role of the UN," described as "... closing out 2010 and ringing in 2011." His views are expressed in an op-ed published in the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia.

The Secretary-General speaks of the challenges and struggles of the United Nations as it enters the New Year. It would have been a tremendous opportunity to draw attention to UN Women ... after all, the creation of an entirely new agency devoted to half the world's population is something to be noted and celebrated.

But there's not a word on UN Women.

And that's only the half of it. The other half provokes disbelief. In a paragraph that summarizes the Millennium Development Goals, the Secretary-General of the United Nations lists seven of the eight goals: the only one left out is, astonishingly, the goal on gender equality and the empowerment of women. How is that possible?

Dr. Bachelet, you have your work cut out for you. And your work starts at the top.

Respectfully,

Paula Donovan & Stephen Lewis
Co-Directors, AIDS-Free World

Standing Up for Human Rights

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

A letter by Maurice Tomlinson to the Jamaica Gleaner.

The Editor, Sir:

As CARICOM citizens, we are proud that a majority of Caribbean nations stood up in the United Nations General Assembly on December 22 and voted together, in the words of the Rwanda delegation, to "recognise that ... people (of different sexual orientation) continue to be the target of murder in many of our societies, and they are more at risk than many ... other groups".

Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and St. Kitts-Nevis joined 85 other nations in voting specifically to mention sexual orientation, in a biennial UN resolution, as one ground of vulnerability for being murdered or executed unlawfully for who you are.

All but one of our Caribbean governments had supported an effort in committee by a bloc of Arab, African and Islamic nations, several of which execute gays and lesbians or would like to, to remove the reference. We appreciate their responsiveness, with the notable exception of Trinidad and Tobago, to our reasoned appeals. We salute the foreign ministries of Belize and Jamaica who communicated with gay and lesbian voters about their December vote, a welcome measure of accountability and transparency in our foreign policy.

Non-discrimination

On the other hand, the St. Lucia delegation seems not to have listened to their prime minister's pledge in Parliament this April to "stand against stigma and discrimination in all its forms" and "guarantee non-discrimination against persons on the basis of sexual orientation". St. Lucia stood apart from CARICOM in voting no.

We, in the Caribbean, have lived largely free of the levels of violence experienced by postcolonial nations like Rwanda. But we continue to harbour a colonial mentality that some groups are more worthy than others; and homophobic killings are a reality several places in the region. We hope that, without the need for atrocity to teach us this lesson, our governments will mature in their understanding that everyone has an essential right to equality and protection because they are human.

The vote is a hopeful sign that in 2011 Caribbean governments may get serious about their commitments to these rights at home.

I am, etc.,

Maurice Tomlinson

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AIDS-Free World Urges the African Union to Take a Stand Against the Homophobia Sweeping the Continent

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

H.E. Dr. Jean Ping
Chairperson
African Union Commission
African Union Headquarters
Addis Ababa
Ethiopia

Excellency:

We are writing to express our grave concern about the recent escalation of homophobia throughout the African continent. A vocal minority spouting hatred, paranoia, and intolerance is dominating public discourse. In response, increasing numbers of parliaments are attempting to criminalize homosexuality, and increasing numbers of African leaders are publicly endorsing this criminalization. Currently, over two-thirds of countries in the African Union have legislation that criminalizes homosexuality. AIDS-Free World is disturbed by the silence of AU leaders in the face of this discrimination, and we urgently call upon the African Union to hold a special session to address the issue.

We do not believe it is the intention of the African Union to condone this homophobia and discrimination, given the strong commitments to human rights and equality enshrined in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which states unequivocally that “All peoples shall be equal; they shall enjoy the same respect and have the same rights.” The African Union’s Constitutive Act and the Maputo Protocol clearly enumerate respect for human rights as well, and this year the AU chose to focus on non-discrimination in its celebration of International Human Rights Day.

We also do not believe that it is the intention of the African Union to take a devastating step backwards in the fight against AIDS. Yet that is precisely what will happen if this growing homophobia is not addressed strongly and swiftly. When homosexuality is demonized — whether through hate speech, discriminatory legislation, or criminalization — lesbians and gays are driven underground into unsafe and often terrifying situations, their prospects of receiving counseling and testing to establish their HIV status diminish drastically, and it becomes virtually impossible to reach them with the information, education, and condoms that can prevent the spread of HIV. We know that rates of HIV amongst men who have sex with men are already higher than rates in the general population. Enabling or sanctioning homophobia will only exacerbate the crisis.

Recent news stories paint a wrenching picture of the tide of anti-gay sentiment rising throughout the continent:

— In Uganda, hatred stemming from fear and paranoia is causing individual citizens to attack homosexuals verbally and physically. Most recently, a young journalist outed numerous lesbians and gay men in a tabloid magazine that quickly attracted local and international attention, placing their lives in imminent danger. The newspaper ran photographs of the men and women under the subheading “Hang Them.”

— Just this month, as Ghana undergoes a constitutional reform process, self-appointed spokespersons have been attempting to limit the rights of the lesbian and gay community in order to ultimately criminalize homosexuality altogether. Without strong leadership from elected officials, these voices may succeed in codifying discrimination within the new constitution.

— Reports from Senegal detail beatings and arrests of gay citizens, as well as desecration of their graves.

— In Cameroon, women suspected of being lesbian have been targeted for rape and risk losing custody of their children.

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