AIDS 2024: Politics and Human Rights

Joseph J. Amon

The plenary on day 3 of AIDS 2024 had a strong emphasis on HIV, human rights, and politics. Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), gave a rousing talk entitled “Global Health is a Matter of Global Politics”. This linked well with Micheala Clayton’s presentation on criminalization, which referred to the need to focus on political determinants of health and a political epidemiology that examines the impact of laws, policies, and their enforcement on health.

Clark’s speech highlighted how the “poly-crisis” of conflicts, disasters, and economic challenges impacts global health and hinders the fight against AIDS. Her prescription was for greater collective action through multilateralism, and attention to stigma, discrimination, criminalization, and human rights abuses which are preventing progress towards an end of AIDS by 2030. Clark also spoke of debt crises in low- and middle-income countries and their effect on investments in health, education, and climate change measures, with progress towards Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) lagging and resulting challenges in reducing poverty, maternal deaths, and ensuring child survival.

Clayton started with the Denver Principles of 1983, and showing how 41 years later the same struggles remain for people who are criminalized because of their HIV status and/or identities. Her talk described the slow progress in overturning HIV-specific laws related to exposure, transmission, and non-disclosure, condemning the way these laws are overly broad, fail to recognize current science (such as undetectable viral loads) and have vast, negative, impacts. However, these laws existing in 79 countries, Clayton noted that progress was being made, with reforms of HIV-specific criminal laws in nine countries, and increasing use of up-to-date HIV science in the criminal justice system following the publication of the Expert Consensus Statement on the Science of HIV in the Context of Criminal Law in 2018.

Two other sessions highlighted HIV and human rights. The first, in the conference’s global village, focused on the release this week by the Global Fund of the summary report of an assessment of rights-based interventions in 20 countries. The report describes the power of sustained and comprehensive investment in human rights programs and its concrete impact on access to HIV prevention and treatment services for key and vulnerable populations. Among the programs that were funded, and that showed impact, were paralegal programs, training of health care providers and law enforcement agents on rights and non-discrimination, and policy and legal advocacy.

The second session was related to the release earlier this year of the Lancet Commission’s Health and Human Rights report. Echoing Helen Clark’s presentation, the report highlighted the deterioration of human rights over the past two decades globally and the impact on the health of the most vulnerable. Speakers at the conference summarized some of these challenges and the ways in which the HIV movement needs to build solidarity with other movements to address the social, political, and environmental factors that are undermining human rights and human dignity.

Joseph J. Amon, PhD, MSPH, is editor-in-chief of Health and Human Rights, and director of the Office of Global Health and a clinical professor at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, Philadelphia, United States.