26 November 2010
"Behind Bars‟ – a collection of interviews published by the International Planned Parenthood Federation - exposes how criminal laws on HIV transmission are affecting people’s working and private lives all around the world.
The stories illustrate the personal and professional dilemmas faced by doctors, lawyers, researchers and advocates. They include the stories of a doctor who was forced to aid a police investigation against her ethical principles, a woman living with HIV who prosecuted her former partner and a lawyer who advocated in an HIV transmission case.
The nature and impact of the criminal law and its impact on the response to HIV is neither well documented nor well understood. But it risks further marginalizing people already vulnerable to HIV infection, including women, men who have sex with men, sex workers and people who use drugs. Legislation and legal practice is different in every country around the world, and collectively we need to become more conscious of the impact of both the criminal law and its implementation on national responses to HIV.
By fuelling stigma, criminalization undermines efforts to prevent, treat and care for HIV.
From the UK to the USA, Mali to Mozambique, Azerbaijan to Australia, criminal laws are increasingly being used to prosecute HIV transmission or exposure. But, as the interviews reveal, criminal law is a blunt instrument for HIV prevention.
Behind Bars show how a simplistic ‘law-and-order’ response to HIV can intensify a climate of denial, secrecy and fear and provide a fertile breeding ground for the spread of HIV.
The drive for criminalization of wilful transmission of HIV is proving a costly intervention - in terms of time and money spent on investigating individual's private lives and determining the burden of proof - and seems to have had limited impact on HIV prevention.
Contributor Jan Albert, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Karolinska Institute Sweden, says:
“Since I’ve been an expert witness in court trials, my personal opinion regarding people living with the virus has changed. In my experience the accused are seldom ‘criminals’. There are many reasons for neglecting to inform sexual partners about HIV status, including denial. None, or very few, have had the intent to transmit HIV, which is how these acts often are described by the media. There will be more and more HIV infected people living in Sweden, and the rest of the world. Do we want to turn a proportion of our population into potential criminals every time they have sex?”
Kevin Osborne, Senior HIV Advisor for IPPF, said:
“These stories show that criminalizing the transmission of HIV is actually undermining our efforts to prevent the spread of HIV. Fear of prosecution deters people from coming forward for testing and counselling; policing the bedroom effectively drives the problem underground.”
Behind Bars is published as part of IPPF’s ‘Criminalize hate, not HIV' campaign, for World AIDS Day (1 December).
Notes for Editors
As part of its Criminalize hate, not HIV campaign, IPPF is screening a short campaign video that highlights the dimensions and impact of laws that criminalize HIV transmission. The film is also available on YouTube.
The two-minute film is stylized and artistic, showing the humanness of sex, of relationships and of HIV. The people in the film share their own, diverse stories (they are not professional actors), and many are living with HIV.
It builds on Sexual rights: an IPPF declaration and purposefully focuses on sex – irrespective of how, where, with whom and why people have sex.
The film hints at not only the laws criminalizing HIV transmission and exposure, but also laws criminalizing behaviours associated with HIV transmission (drug injection, sex work and sex between men).
Facts
The law has been used to criminalize the transmission of HIV since the end of the 1990s - almost 20 years after the HIV virus was first discovered. In some countries this has been under old laws (from the nineteenth century or exported through colonialism) and in others under new laws explicitly drafted as part of the national response to HIV. Some 16 countries are in the process of considering HIV-specific laws at the moment, and half of them are in Africa.
• At least 16 prosecutions by the Crown Prosecution Service have taken place in the UK since 2001 – disrupting lives and damaging public health gains.
• 41 countries – 20 per cent of the countries in the world – have laws under which HIV transmission or exposure has been prosecuted.
• 63 countries have HIV-specific criminal laws in at least one jurisdiction – 27 in Africa, 13 in Asia, 11 in Latin America and the Caribbean, nine in Europe and two in Oceania and one in North America – of which 17 countries have utilised these laws to prosecute individuals.
• Europe is second only to North America as the region with the highest number of criminal prosecutions for HIV transmission in the world. Legal standards set by many European countries do not provide models for imitation.
• To date prosecutions have primarily been for sexual transmission or exposure.
• In some countries, such as Canada and the USA, laws have been used to send mothers to prison for transmitting HIV to their child.
• In Egypt, merely living with HIV can lead to prosecution for crimes of ‘debauchery’.
• The USA and Canada lead the world in terms of number of prosecutions and convictions of HIV transmission, with more than 300 convictions between them. Sweden leads Europe with at least 38 known prosecutions; and Australia for the Pacific region with more than 11 known convictions.
• Of any country in the world, Sweden has the highest number of criminal prosecutions per 1,000 people living with HIV.
• In Africa, although the legal provisions exist in many countries, there are a few known cases relating to HIV transmission to date, for example in Burkina Faso, Malawi, Togo and Zimbabwe.
• The media coverage of HIV criminal prosecutions in the UK has generated headlines such as “AIDS Assassin”, undermining decades of work to reduce the stigma associated with HIV.
• In the UK, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) produced guidelines for reporting on HIV in 2007 . In 2009 these were updated by the National AIDS Trust (NAT), NUJ and Society of Editors to include issues relating to criminalization. In 2010 NAT also produced Guidelines for Reporting HIV: Advice for Editors and Journalists Writing about HIV in the UK.
Contact
Kevin Osborne, 020 7939 8275