13 May Alarm as Uganda moves to criminalize HIV transmission
Activists in Uganda, where HIV prevalence is on the rise, have warned that new legislation criminalizing deliberate transmission of the virus will further efforts to stem the AIDS epidemic and erode the rights of those living with HIV.
As well as setting out fines and jail terms of up to 10 years for those found guilty of “willful and intentional” transmission, the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Bill, passed by parliament on 8 May and now awaiting presidential assent, also obliges pregnant women and their partners to take HIV tests, and in some circumstances empowers health workers to unilaterally disclose a patient’s positive status to an at-risk partner or household member. It also obliges parents to tell their children of their status.
“Despite years of engagement and labouring to explain the dangers on an HIV-specific criminal law, parliament has refused to be advised. When experts on HIV research and management attempted to speak, [lawmakers] still failed to heed to the key concerns,” Dorah Kinconco Musinguzi, executive director of Uganda Network on Law, Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UgaNet), told IRIN.
Over the past five years HIV prevalence in Uganda has risen from 6.4 to 7.3 percent.
“The evidence from the Ugandan Ministry of Health shows clearly – criminalization of HIV doesn’t work. It drives people away from services and fuels discrimination and fear,” Asia Russell of the HIV advocacy organization Health GAP, told IRIN.
Alex Ario, the national coordinator of the ministry’s AIDS Control Programme (ACP), said “the bill may not be that useful in my view. It does not add value to the current efforts. Actually, with dwindling support from donor communities to ACP as it is now, we would rather divert efforts to lobby government of Uganda to put more money for HIV activities rather than legislating against people with HIV.”
Russell added that in conjunction with the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which passed into law in February 2014, this new law could lead “a sex worker apprehended for sex work, who is transgender and HIV positive, [to] be sent to prison for life.”
UgaNet’s Musinguzi said: “This [bill] will hurt the women we have been encouraging to come up to take an HIV test such that they can have HIV-free children. But in this case, they will be forced to disclose their results and should they fear, and not do it in time, that means that they are potential candidates for [prosecution under] the bill…
“There is high likelihood that justice will not prevail for the HIV-positive [people] found in this situation because of the high levels of stigma and condemnation that we have seen the HIV-positive go through,” she added.
More than 150,000 people are becoming HIV-positive every year; 1.5 million Ugandans are HIV-positive, according to Uganda AIDS Commission statistics.
The bill also flies in the face of the “rights-based” approach to HIV embodied in the regional HIV/AIDS Act passed in April 2012 by the East African Legislative Assembly.
Source: irin news