BATTLING ON BOTH FRONTS

People With HIV/AIDS Still Face Human Rights Violations

A Mexican AIDS activist is stabbed to death in his condom shop. In
China, 23 people infected with the AIDS virus are put under house
arrest. A Ugandan woman is murdered by her lover after she tells him
she has the disease. An HIV-positive 15-year-old Kenyan boy is
killed by a pitchfork wielded by his uncle as villagers, fearing
infection, stand idly by.

These are just a few of the "outrageous abuses" suffered by people
with HIV/AIDS in the last year -- and such acts of violence and
government repression are undermining efforts to fight the global
epidemic, Human Rights Watch told a Toronto news conference recently.

"Twenty-five years into the epidemic, people living with HIV or AIDS
are still feared and stigmatized," said Joe Amon, the New York-based
organization's director of HIV/AIDS. "We can't defeat AIDS unless we
end outrageous abuses against activists, outreach workers, people
living with AIDS and those most vulnerable to infection."

It is a message that Human Rights Watch will speak about loudly and
often at the International AIDS Conference, to be held next month in Toronto.

While human rights issues have been widely discussed at previous
meetings of the biennial conference, "little concrete actions are
put behind the words," said Amon.

"We know everything that we need right now to fight the epidemic,"
he said. "We need resources. We need governments to have a political
commitment, to show a will and to protect those who are vulnerable.

"Governments are specifically failing to apply the lessons that have
been learned from the epidemic over the last 25 years."

For example, countries like Ukraine that prohibit and crack down on
needle-exchange and methadone programs in a bid to reduce
intravenous drug abuse are only fuelling the HIV/AIDS epidemic, said Amon.

"If you take a hardline, police approach, what you do is drive users
underground, further away from services that protect them from HIV,
and you'll spread the disease further."

Other countries whose AIDS-prevention policies were paying off in
lower rates of new cases have begun to lose ground with a shift in
political and social attitudes. Uganda, for instance, had a sharp
decrease in HIV prevalence rates, which levelled off at about six
per cent of the adult population in 2002. But recently, the
infection rate has started to climb, Amon said.

The Ugandan government, backed by evangelical groups, has switched
its policy of providing comprehensive education on AIDS prevention
to its populace and -- following the U.S. lead -- is now emphasizing
sexual abstinence until marriage and abandoning the promotion of
condoms, he said.

In many African countries with high HIV rates, women have infection
rates up to 10 times higher than men, Amon said. But gender
inequalities can make them more vulnerable to the disease: their
homes and other property may be seized upon divorce or death of
their husband, leaving them homeless and impoverished. Many women,
especially in rural areas, have no access to health care, including
anti-AIDS drugs.

In most African countries overall, only about 10 per cent of men,
women and children who need anti-AIDS drugs are receiving them, said
Amon. "Without them, they die within about two years."

Georgette Gagnon, the organization's deputy director for Africa,
said government policies in Zimbabwe are also starting to erode the
progress that country has made against HIV/AIDS.

In an action last year dubbed Operation Cleanse the Filth, thousands
of people were evicted from their homes in low-income neighbourhoods
of many Zimbabwean cities. An estimated one-fifth had HIV and were
no longer able to access treatment, said Gagnon.

"These people are still destitute and homeless," she said. "Many
have been forced to move to rural areas where they have no access to
food or medical treatment.

"So this is a very clear example of where very outrageous human
rights violations have exacerbated the epidemic . . . More people
became vulnerable to getting the infection because of the lack of services."