History of the recognition of the importance of human rights in the context of HIV

History of the recognition of the importance of human rights in the context of HIV
1. The World Health Organization (WHO) held an International Consultation on Health Legislation and Ethics in the Fields of HIV/AIDS in April 1988 at Oslo. It advocated bringing down barriers between people who were infected and those who were not infected and placing actual barriers (e.g. condoms) between individuals and the virus. On 13 May 1988, the World Health Assembly passed resolution WHA41.24 entitled “Avoidance of discrimination in relation to HIV-infected people and people with AIDS”, which underlined how vital respect for human rights was for the success of national AIDS prevention and control programmes and urged member States to avoid discriminatory action in the provision of services, employment and travel. In July 1989, the first international consultation on AIDS and human rights was organized by the then United Nations Centre for Human Rights, in cooperation with the World Health Organization/GPA. The report of the consultation highlighted the human rights issues raised in the context of HIV/AIDS and proposed the elaboration of guidelines. Resolution WHA45.35 of 14 May 1992 recognized that there is no public health rationale for measures which arbitrarily limit individual rights, such as mandatory screening. In 1990, the World Health Organization conducted regional workshops on the legal and ethical aspects of HIV/AIDS at Seoul, Brazzaville and New Delhi. The first of these workshops developed guidelines to evaluate current and elaborate future legal measures for the control of HIV to be used as a check-list by countries considering legal policy issues.59 In November 1991, the WHO Regional Office for Europe and the International Association of Rights and Humanity held a Pan-European Consultation on HIV/AIDS in the Context of Public Health and Human Rights in Prague, which considered the Rights and Humanity Declaration and Charter and developed a consensus statement (the Prague Statement). Three further consultations on HIV, law and law reform were convened during 1995 by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, for countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The United Nations Development Programme held Inter-Country Consultations on Ethics, Law and HIV in Cebu (Philippines) in May 1993 and in Dakar, in June 1994।60 Both of these consultations produced consensus documents reaffirming a commitment to voluntarism, ethics and the human rights of those affected (the Cebu Statement of Belief and the Dakar Declaration). UNDP also held Regional Training Workshops on HIV Law and Law Reform in Asia and the Pacific at Colombo, Beijing and Nadi (Fiji) in 1995.
Law reform programmes focusing on human rights have been ongoing in countries such as Australia, Canada, the United States, South Africa and in the Latin American region, together with networks of legal advocates, practitioners and activists at governmental and community levels. One concrete achievement of such groups has been the successful lobbying for general anti-discrimination legislation at national and local levels which defines disability broadly and sensitively enough toexplicitly include HIV/AIDS. Such civil legislation exists in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In France, such a definition is contained in the Penal Code. Some countries have constitutional guarantees of human rights with practical enforcement mechanisms, such as the Canadian Charter of Rights.