AIDS 2024: Support for Community-led Human Rights Initiatives Needed Urgently

Megan McLemore

Front-line activists have described the alarming rise in repressive laws and policies targeting marginalized communities around the world at the 25th International AIDS Conference. Since 2023, the rights of LGBTQI and gender non-conforming people, women, and girls—and rights to free speech and free association—have come under increasing attack in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Indonesia, Iraq, the United States, and other settings. In Ukraine, HIV advocates and service providers have heroically responded to a Russian military invasion that not only disrupted prevention and treatment but threatens, in areas controlled by Russia and nationally if Russia prevails, a wider curtailment of rights on sexual and gender minorities, prisoners, and people who use drugs. Transgender activists in the Netherlands suffered a wave of malicious personal attacks and threats of violence.

Community leaders outlined the strategies they are using to defend the gains made in ending the HIV epidemic and to protect their rights to health, to autonomy, and in many cases, to life itself. Though tactics and programming varied according to the local context, common themes emerged as critical to implementing and sustaining human rights defenders, including:

• Collaboration across networks of people and communities impacted, as coalitions of PLHIV, women, LGBTQI, trans, people who use drugs, and others are more powerful than a fragmented assortment of smaller groups
• Development of crisis communications strategies that can quickly inform the public and mobilize constituents in response to fast-moving developments, both negative and positive
• Building capacity for documentation of the impact of repressive laws on rights and health, with an emphasis on “storytelling” as a compelling form of advocacy
• Ensuring the safety and security of community members who participate in the movement to protect and defend their rights.

Many of the speakers were from organizations supported by the Global Fund’s Breaking Down Barriers (BDB) initiative. Since 2017, BDB has provided more than USD 200 million for programs to reduce human rights-related barriers to HIV, TB and malaria services. The BDB latest evaluation report has just been released at AIDS 2024, in which significant progress across 20 countries is reported. The bottom line is that rights-based initiatives can be successfully scaled up, and implementing these programs in partnership with civil society makes a big impact on increased access to HIV services.

Donors were put on notice: we need your help more than ever and rights-based approaches work. Community leaders called on donors to base support on local conditions, have the flexibility to allow innovation, hold governments accountable for protection of human rights, and perhaps most importantly, do all they can to provide sustainable funding over time. In many settings, front-line advocates face a long, difficult, and increasingly urgent battle for human rights.

Megan McLemore, JD, LLM, is a health and human rights consultant.