Lawyers, NGOs are in an uproar over extensive changes to an important bill.
Today is World Human Rights Day. It’s also a day when people living with and affected by HIV-AIDS will seek protection of their rights. They will oppose the extensive changes made to the HIV-AIDS bill by the law ministry.
The bill was drafted by the Lawyers Collective, a top public interest service provider, on the instructions of the government. The main objectives of the legislation were to protect the rights of those living with and affected by HIV-AIDS, and to prevent and control the spread of the disease.
An estimated 2.3 million people live with the disease in the country. The bill was drafted after 15 consultations with various stakeholders — women, children, People Living with HIV-AIDS (PLHAs), sex workers, Men having Sex with Men (MSM),Injecting Drug Users (IDUs), lawyers, doctors etc. A final draft of the bill was submitted in 2006, after which it went for feedback to various central ministries, state governments, and state Aids control societies. In September 2007, it reached the Law Ministry.
“The work of the Law Ministry was to see whether the bill violated any provision of the Constitution, or any provision pertaining to any other law,” says Raman Chawla, advocacy officer for the HIV-AIDS unit of the Lawyers Collective. “After sitting on it for more than a year, the ministry made some drastic changes, which were not within its domain.”
Two important chapters in the bill — one on the treatment of HIV-AIDS, and one on risk reduction, were deleted. “The part about treatment, essentially said that the government provide people anti-retrovirals, OI treatment, CD4, the Viral Load test, as well as nutritional supplements, free of cost,” says Chawla.
“We are saying that people should get treatment as a matter of right, but the entire chapter on treatment has been deleted.”
The chapter on risk reduction, which sought to grant immunity to various targeted intervention programmes (TI) was also deleted. The TI programmes, which provide condoms to sex workers and homosexuals, and clean syringes to IDUs, to prevent the spread of the disease are in conflict with Indian law. Under the law, all these are seen as abetting the crimes of prostitution, homosexuality, and drug use.
“The idea in our draft was that anybody providing or receiving help to try to prevent the spread of the disease cannot be criminalised,” says Chawla. The TI programmes, he says, have proven to be the most effective way to reduce the incidence of HIV-AIDS.
The Law Ministry also introduced a new provision in the bill, regarding surveillance and rehabilitation. So far, testing for HIV-AIDS has been anonymous in government health centres. But, the ministry now wants lists of HIV positive people to be made available to health officers. Such officers will also have the authority to trace the source of the infection, direct people to undergo mandatory tests, and put them in a hospital or other places to stop the spread of the disease.
“They are trying to reintroduce the isolationist approach of the 80s, which has failed, especially at a time when the integrationist approach is being advocated. The biggest fallout of this will be that the HIV population will stop accessing prevention or treatment services and the disease will go underground,” says Chawla.
Anand Grover, project director of the HIV-AIDS unit of Lawyers Collective, says, “They [Law Ministry] have not understood the bill at all. It is about the rights of the HIV population, it is about prevention programmes where clean syringes and condoms have to be given.”
The protest movement calls for protecting the rights of the people living with and affected by the disease. The National Coalition in support of the HIV-AIDS bill, that comprises positive people’s networks, civil society organisations working with women, children and vulnerable communities, will demand that the Law Ministry’s version of the bill be rejected.
r_debjani@dnaindia.net
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