The PJP Update – July 2020

The July 2020 edition of the Positive Justice Project newsletter is available here.

Watch all the videos of Beyond Blame @HIV2020 – our “perfectly executed…deftly curated, deeply informative” webshow

Earlier this month, advocates from all over the world came together for two hours to discuss the successes and challenges of the global movement to end HIV criminalisation.

All of the recordings of Beyond Blame: Challenging HIV Criminalisation for HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE are now available on the HIV Justice Network’s YouTube Channel.

“HUGE pleasure 2B at #BeyondBlame2020 conference – deftly curated, deeply informative; speakers were great; the passion & commitment to #HIVjustice was palpable. Much progress yet a sober reminder that the work is far from over.”

Kene Esom, Policy Specialist: Human Rights, Law and Gender, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)

 

The full-length director’s cut version – with enhanced audio and video – is now available in English as well as with the audio track of the recorded simultaneous translation in French, Spanish, Russian, and Portuguese.

The English version is also available as a YouTube playlist in ‘bite-size’ chunks, with each segment of the webshow available as standalone videos.  This means, for example, if you just want to watch (or share) the segment on ‘women challenging HIV criminalisation in Africa‘, or on ‘bringing science to justice, and justice to science‘, it’s now possible.

“That webinar was perfectly executed. Great sound, engaging transitions (they actually played people on and off!), and multiple speakers in various collections. Having ALL OF THEM back at the end showed the breadth of this technical accomplishment and the depth of the speakers’ field of expertise. Not everyone may notice these things but boy, I sure do, and it was totally pro. I’ve seen big name conferences who couldn’t get this right… Congratulations all around, and especially to [director] Nicholas Feustel.

Mark S King, My Fabulous Disease

 

We have also made available for the first time the standalone recording of Edwin Cameron’s closing speech, which inspired so many.  The transcript is included in full below.

“We have been being battling this fight for many years. Since the start of the HIV epidemic we as gay men, as gay women, as queers, as transgender people, as sex workers, as people using drugs, have been persecuted by the criminal law. And I’m here to say, “Enough! Enough!

We have achieved a great deal with our movement, with the HIV Justice Network. We have achieved a great deal in conscientizing law makers, law givers and the public. It is now time for us to join in unison to demand the end of these stigmatising, retrograde, unproductive, hurtful, harmful laws.

It is a long struggle we’ve engaged in. And it’s one that has hurt many of us. Some of us here today, some of us listening in, some of us who have spoken, have felt the most brutal brush of the law. They have been imprisoned, unjustly prosecuted, unjustly convicted, and unjustly sent away.

HIV is not a crime. But there is more to it. Criminalising HIV, criminalising the transmission or exposure of HIV, as many countries on my own beautiful continent Africa do, is not just stupid and retrograde. It impedes the most important message of the HIV epidemic now, which is that this epidemic is manageable. I’ve been on antiretroviral treatment now for very nearly 23 years. My viral load has been undetectable for more than 20.

We can beat this, but we have to approach this issue as public health issue. We have to approach it rationally and sensibly, and without stigma, and without targeting people, and without seeking to hurt and marginalise people.We’ve made calamitous mistakes with the misapplication of the criminal law over the last hundred years, in the so-called ‘war on drugs’. We continue to make a calamitous mistake in Africa and elsewhere by misusing the criminal law against queer people like myself. We make a huge mistake by misusing the criminal law against people with HIV.

Let us rise today and say, “Enough!”

 

New Zealand: Despite spitting not transmitting HIV, prison officers are tested every 3 months for a full year if coming into contact with spit

Corrections officer spat in face by prisoner waiting months for test results

A Corrections officer who was spat in the face by a prisoner during the Covid-19 lockdown has spent months waiting to find out if he now has a serious disease.

Under the Corrections Act, any officer who comes in to contact with a prisoner’s bodily fluids must undergo a year of testing for infections like HIV and hepatitis, before getting a clean bill of health.

The Corrections Association has asked for a law change that would force any prisoner who spits or throws bodily fluids to be tested as well.

On 25 March two Corrections officers were spat in the face while restraining a prisoner.

One of the officers told RNZ they had the prisoner’s saliva in their eyes and mouths and were then threatened by him.

The prisoner told them “I hope you get coronavirus and your kids and wives get it too and hope they die”, the officer said.

“This was very concerning as it was at the height of the coronavirus threat in New Zealand and there was the likely possibility of contracting other viruses.”

He was then sent to the doctor for tests and told he would not know if he had hepatitis until a second blood test three months later.

The officer said he would need one year of three monthly tests before HIV could be ruled out.

He said he was worried about catching a serious illness and waiting so long to find out was taking a huge toll.

“My wife and kids refrain from hugging me and I use my same plate, cup, and cutlery every meal.

“I must clean everything I use thoroughly to help reduce the possible transmission.”

The officer is still waiting for the all clear.

However, the New Zealand Aids Foundation says saliva is not an effective route of transmission of HIV and studies have shown HIV cannot be transmitted through spitting.

Corrections Association president Alan Whitley said the long delay for answers weighed heavily on the staff.

“It gives them 12 months of uncertainty about what’s happening with their health and whether they could have caught anything from the prisoner.

“It puts an enormous amount of stress on them.

“They’re sitting there not knowing whether they’ve got anything but if they have got something, is it contagious? What sort of treatment can I get? Can they get any treatment if they don’t know what I’ve got can there be a broad spectrum treatment. Is it the right thing to do?

“All sorts of things run through their mind,” he said.

In May, he asked the minister of corrections to make an amendment to the Corrections Act to make any prisoner who assaults an officer with bodily fluid to also be tested for possible infections.

“What it would mean is that the prisoner could be tested and the results of the tests released to the staff member for their doctor.

“Now, if there’s nothing, if it shows nothing, there’s a little bit of a comfort that they may not have picked anything up, they’ll still need to go through the same testing, but the understanding is there that the likelihood is low.

“If the prisoner has got something, then they can discuss that with the medical professional and he can or she can make a decision on what type of treatment they should undergo.”

However, the minister, Kelvin Davis, said changing the Corrections Act could be a breach of the Bill of Rights and would not provide a result any faster.

Any assaults on Corrections staff were completely unacceptable and he expected them to be responded to very seriously and the perpetrators held to account, he said.

“Changing the Corrections Act to introduce compulsory testing is unlikely to deter a person from spitting in the heat of the moment.

“Including a power in the Act to test a person by force is also likely to increase risk to staff, as it would require further close contact with the perpetrator.”

National Party corrections spokesperson Simeon Brown didn’t agree.

He said prison officers should not have to go through a year of uncertainty.

“I think prisoners are in prison.

“They essentially give up certain aspects of the human rights when they’re there and they are being held there to protect the rest of society from them.

“At the end of the day, this is about ensuring that corrections officers who are on the frontlines working to keep us safe are also protected from any diseases or illnesses they may pick up from prisoners.”

Brown said National would support a law change because Corrections officers deserved to have confidence the system would back them up.

How is the Expert Consensus Statement bringing science to justice?

Two years ago this month saw the launch of the Expert consensus statement on the science of HIV in the context of criminal law (Expert Consensus Statement) at a press conference during AIDS2018 in Amsterdam, published in the Journal of the International AIDS Society (JIAS), and translated into French, Russian and Spanish.

Authored by 20 of the world’s leading HIV scientists, and endorsed by more than 70 additional expert scientists, as well as IAPAC, IAS and UNAIDS, the Expert Consensus Statement described current evidence on HIV transmission, treatment effectiveness and forensics so that HIV-related science may be better understood in criminal law contexts.

The Expert Consensus Statement was the end result of a multi-year process developed by a partnership comprising the International AIDS Society (IAS), the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care (IAPAC), the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE Steering Committee.

The HIV Justice Network has now published an interim scoping report, written by HJN’s Senior Policy Analyst Sally Cameron, that explores the impact of the Expert Consensus Statement in the two years since its publication.  It is now available in English and French (see bottom of page for download links).

The report concludes that the Expert Consensus Statement is meeting both its primary aim (to support defence arguments in HIV criminalisation cases) and its secondary aim (supporting lobbying for law and policy reform) in many jurisdictions. But it also found that the process of developing and promoting the content of the Expert Consensus Statement has delivered additional benefits that further support advocacy efforts to end HIV criminalisation.

In summary, the Expert Consensus Statement is being used to:

  • Assist HIV criminalisation defence arguments and strategic litigation, changing courts’ understanding of transmission risks associated with HIV and the effectiveness of modern treatments.
  • Shape advocacy for law and policy reform, including mobilising stakeholders to lobby for reform, delivering law and policy reform, improving legal and judicial practice, facilitating community advocates’ access to government and judicial bodies, and gaining support from public health bodies and customary and religious leaders.
  • Inform scientific and medical thinking, including being cited in many peer reviewed articles and in scientific and medical press, being hosted on the sites of scientific/medical/academic organisations, and being ranked the #1 JIAS article to date.
  • Develop stronger relationships that cross silos and advance capacity, enabling efficient and informal communications between partners to rapidly move projects forward, with Expert Consensus Statement authors supporting community organisations by assisting in defence cases, answering ad hoc questions and co-authoring abstracts, presentations and articles.
  • Disseminate accurate, positive messages about people living HIV and the issue of HIV criminalisation, including facilitating keynote addresses and presentations at notable conferences and meetings, and generating global mainstream, community and social media. Ultimately, interest in the Expert Consensus Statement has elevated the global conversation about HIV criminalisation, with co-ordinated messaging translating into a powerful positive narrative in many sites.

 

US: Activists activists raise concerns over the links between public health & law enforcement surveillance

Questioning the Benefits of Molecular Surveillance

Can this HIV prevention strategy overcome mistrust and fear among marginalized communities?

In Texas, health officials recently used a new surveillance technology to identify a large HIV outbreak among gay and bisexual Latino men. In Massachusetts, officials used the same strategy to respond to an outbreak among injection drug users. And in California, researchers used the method to identify a transmission cluster among transgender women.

Led by initial proof-of-principle research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an HIV prevention strategy known as molecular surveillance is quickly expanding across the country. Since December 2015, according to an email from a CDC source who commented on background, the technique, based on sequencing and comparing individuals’ viral genetic blueprints, has identified more than 240 recent and rapidly growing HIV transmission clusters, the vast majority of which had not previously been recognized. Comparing these sequences allows researchers to determine whether individuals’ HIV is closely related, which offers clues about who transmitted the virus to whom. 

Traditional public health methods—now being used to trace the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus—largely rely on asking people about their contacts and getting in touch with them by phone or in person. The CDC source said molecular data analysis allows for more rapid and comprehensive cluster and outbreak detection and response. As such, molecular surveillance is seen by the agency as a key part of effective HIV prevention and a means to help hard-hit communities and the nation end the HIV epidemic.

Those idealized goals, however, are clashing with a far messier reality in which decades of mistrust and fear among marginalized communities, heightened in the current political climate, are coming to a head. The tech-aided HIV surveillance strategy, six activists told POZ, could open up new avenues for private data to be breached, exploited, subpoenaed or otherwise released through many of the HIV criminalization laws and statutes still on the books in 34 states.

Activists say the CDC-led molecular surveillance effort was launched with little or no consultation or buy-in from the communities most likely to be impacted. Several meetings ensued, including one convened in 2018 by the O’Neill Institute for National & Global Health Law at Georgetown Law School in Washington, DC, that allowed critics to air some of their concerns. Despite a subsequent round of CDC guidelines on how best to safeguard patient data, however, the controversy has only grown over the potential misuse and unintended consequences of the surveillance scheme.

Patients can’t opt out of providing their viral sequence data for the molecular tracking, critics point out. Nor does the strategy adequately consider the state-by-state patchwork of protections and penalties or the growing health implications of an erosion of immigrant, minority and LGBTQ rights, they say.

Sean Strub, POZ’s founder and the executive director of the nonprofit Sero Project, which focuses on reforming HIV criminalization laws, says he fears the CDC-led strategy will diminish trust and cooperation with public health agencies and drive more vulnerable people further from the health care system out of fear of surveillance. “I think the risk of unintended consequences is very great,” he says.

Strub and other activists see molecular surveillance as part of a broader trend in the “securitization of disease,” which is increasingly blurring the lines between the public health and criminal justice systems.

“We are potentially threatening people’s freedom just to get cleaner data, and I think it’s a clear ethical concern,” says Devin Hursey, a member of the Missouri HIV Justice Coalition and a board member of Blaq Out, a nonprofit advocacy group for Black queer and transgender people in the Kansas City region. “We can’t just look the other way or say we’re doing our best effort when we’re not really addressing that HIV criminalization still exists.”

The CDC source told POZ that the agency understands and has addressed many of the questions and concerns raised by community advocates. The CDC has strong data protections and security measures in place, the source said, and has worked for many years to provide guidance to states on reviewing and revising criminalization laws and ensuring data are well protected.

But Naina Khanna, executive director of Positive Women’s Network–USA, says the CDC hasn’t responded to specific questions about its data-sharing practices with other federal agencies, like the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Khanna points out that the communities most impacted by HIV are also disproportionately affected by surveillance, policing and criminalization. “That’s extremely concerning when we think about how policing intersects with being a Black gay man or being a Latino gay man,” she says. In response, the CDC source told POZ that all HIV surveillance data are reported to the agency without names or any personal identifiers and are encrypted and protected by an Assurance of Confidentiality under Section 308(d) of the federal Public Health Service Act.

A New Surveillance Tool

When someone tests positive for HIV in the United States, a blood draw allows labs to sequence part of the viral genome, or its genetic blueprint, and use that to determine whether the virus contains mutations that might lead to drug resistance. This information can help doctors tailor the best HIV treatment regimen for each individual. But once the genetic sequencing is complete, health departments can access that data for molecular HIV surveillance. Specifically, they compare viral RNA sequences from multiple individuals to identify clusters of transmission. This is possible because HIV mutates over time; as a result, people with similar genetic sequences are more likely to have been infected around the same time as part of the same person-to-person chain of viral transmission.

Randy Mayer, MS, MPH, chief of the Bureau of HIV, STD and Hepatitis at the Iowa Department of Public Health, says the HIV resistance tests sent in by doctors around the state essentially provide his department with free surveillance data. “It’s something that we can use to try to improve our response that doesn’t really cost us anything,” Mayer says. “So from that point of view, it is cost effective.”

If a state-run computer program finds two or more individuals who share closely related viral sequences, it suggests that HIV might have passed between them or through a close intermediary. Spotting such clusters of transmission could help public health officials identify HIV-positive individuals and their close sexual or needle-sharing partners.

The surveillance approach has multiple potential benefits, researchers say. “This is just one more strategy in the toolbox of surveillance tools used to guide public practice,” says Nanette Benbow, MAS, research assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. HIV transmission clusters identified through this method, she says, may represent only the “tip of the iceberg” of at-risk individuals, since the genetic information is available only for HIV-positive people who’ve been to a doctor and received drug resistance testing. Through contact tracing, though, public health officials can find other people associated with the cluster, contact them and offer them a range of care or prevention services, like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), if they’re not already receiving them.

Benbow says evidence suggests that the rate of HIV transmission within such clusters is much higher than that of transmissions overall, bolstering the case that public health agencies should focus on these clusters as significant sources of active viral transmission.

Some public health experts say the growth of surveillance is inevitable. “You’re not going to stop technology. All you can do is try to get it implemented in an ethical manner,” says Eve Mokotoff, MPH, managing director of HIV Counts, a consulting business based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that assists with HIV surveillance.

Andrew Spieldenner, PhD, vice chair of the U.S. People Living with HIV Caucus and an assistant professor of communications at California State University San Marcos, rejects that argument. “Just because technology exists doesn’t mean we have to use it,” Spieldenner says. “We have to balance it with the harms it does to individuals.”

Newer technology that could extend molecular HIV surveillance is giving activists more pause. One method, called ultra-deep whole-genome next-generation sequencing, isn’t yet part of the CDC strategy. But emerging study data suggest that it could predict the directionality of linked HIV transmissions, potentially adding new evidence to suggest who infected whom. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in fact, recently described how they correctly predicted HIV transmission from an index case to a sexual partner in more than 90% of 105 sample pairs. The direction couldn’t be established in the remaining cases, but the method didn’t incorrectly predict any transmissions.

Other research the CDC is pursuing may help estimate the recency of an infection, meaning whether one person acquired HIV more recently than another. Together, the data could enable additional predictions about when and how HIV infections occurred within transmission clusters. Benbow says the data on their own don’t prove direct transmission, since another individual could have been an intermediary in the chain, but Khanna points out that judges and juries wouldn’t necessarily take these scientific caveats into account. “We see a lot of potential for opening the door to criminalization,” she says.

Despite privacy assurances, Strub maintains that data collected for one purpose is being unethically used for another without patient consent. “It’s not being used evenly across the society. Molecular surveillance focuses on the communities that are already highly marginalized, communities where there is the greatest risk of serious, harmful consequences,” he says. “People of privilege don’t see this.”

In a 2019 letter in the journal Lancet, researchers at the University of California, San Diego responded to criticism of their molecular surveillance study of an HIV transmission cluster involving transgender women by questioning whether informed consent is “imperative” for such analyses. “Surveillance for numerous infectious agents, including HIV, is done ethically and without consent. The public good of HIV surveillance justifies this approach,” they wrote. “Requiring consent for surveillance reporting would preclude a robust understanding of disease distribution and spread and the ensuing benefit to the health of individuals and communities.”

Alexander McClelland, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa, says such arguments reflect the logic that people living with HIV are an “object of risk” to be managed by public health. “We’re not considered to be people who have autonomy or rights to privacy or security of our own lives and our own bodies and our own data,” he says.

Many defenses of molecular surveillance, McClelland adds, also overlook other implications beyond the “broader public good” of repurposing patient data for public health surveillance. Among them, he says, are the criminalization, uncertainty and fear of people who are living with HIV and subject to continual privacy breaches. “People love to say, ‘We’re looking at molecules not people.’ But those molecules are connected to people, and those people are in the social world,” McClelland says, “and you can’t evacuate a virus from the social context that it’s in.”

A Climate of Fear

According to the Center for HIV Law & Policy in New York City, 34 states have enacted some form of HIV criminalization law or sentencing enhancement for other crimes allegedly committed by a person living with HIV. Although the language varies, 21 states have laws under which HIV-positive people who are aware of their status but don’t disclose it to sexual partners can be prosecuted (additional states have prosecuted nondisclosure under different laws); 12 states require the same disclosure among people who share needles. Some laws cover alleged HIV exposure while others cover actual transmission. Between 2009 and 2019, 24 states also prosecuted people living with HIV under other criminal statutes.

The interpretations and enforcement of laws can vary widely as well. In an April 2020 report, the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law documented 209 arrests and 107 convictions under Missouri’s HIV criminalization laws between 1990 and 2009. The report noted that the crimes appeared to be disproportionately enforced in St. Louis and adjacent St. Louis County. Although Black men account for 5.5% of Missouri’s population and 35% of people living with HIV, the report found, they accounted for more than half of HIV crime arrests and convictions over the 20-year period.

“We’re oftentimes targeted by not just HIV laws but by a lot of other different laws. We’re more likely to experience surveillance by law enforcement,” Hursey says of Black men. Layering on the element of molecular surveillance, he adds, only compounds the fear and lack of trust in public health and discourages the honest answers and cooperation necessary for HIV peer educators like him to do their jobs effectively. That mistrust is heightened by the legal requirement that Missouri’s health department must turn over all surveillance data to prosecutors pursuing an HIV criminalization case, he says.

“We have an epidemic of criminalization of people living with HIV, and you can only be prosecuted or convicted if you know your HIV status,” Khanna says. If people already feel marginalized and stigmatized, she and Hursey say, the added threat of criminalization based on knowing their HIV status can deter them from ever seeking out testing or care—the very opposite of stated public health goals.

Marco Castro-Bojorquez, cochair of the HIV Racial Justice Now project, says molecular HIV surveillance could likewise put undocumented immigrants at risk, especially since their existence in the United States is already criminalized. “It’s problematic, and it breaks my heart because a lot of people that could be very affected are those that are so fearful of the government and don’t really know that it’s happening,” he says.

Across the border from Missouri, Mayer says public health data are “well protected” in Iowa. They weren’t always, but in 2014, Iowa reformed its HIV criminalization law. The updated statute, Mayer says, requires proof that an HIV-positive person was negligent in exposing a partner to the virus and prohibits molecular surveillance data gathered by the state health department from being used to prosecute anyone. “I had some upset prosecutors who have tried to come to me, with subpoenas, to get information, which we don’t allow,” he says. Prosecutors can gather the data from other sources, but the health department has largely cut its tether to law enforcement.

Even so, prosecutors have found other mechanisms to gather data and enforce Iowa’s HIV criminalization law. In May, a 33-year-old Black man was sentenced to 26 years for “knowingly” exposing three women and a minor to HIV and transmitting the virus to three of them.

Activists say public health agencies also cannot divorce their molecular surveillance plans, however well intentioned, from the current rollback of LGBTQ, immigrant and minority rights. Castro-Bojorquez says the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies have not only eroded the Latino community’s trust in public officials but also worsened health outcomes. “Those attacks,” he says, “and the promotion of hatred, rolling back the few rights that we had and we fought so hard for, they have an impact, and people die.”

Numerous undocumented immigrants held in crowded detention centers have contracted COVID-19, and some deported immigrants have brought the coronavirus back to Guatemala, Mexico and other countries. Fear of HIV criminalization or deportation, Castro-Bojorquez says, has led other immigrants to avoid or delay “official” activities, including HIV testing and treatment. “Late diagnosis is a major issue in our communities,” he says, adding that it’s a big contributor to higher mortality rates among Latino men.

***

Finding Common Ground

Amid the ongoing controversy, HIV activists and public health officials may be finding common ground on the need for more community engagement and on the importance of decoupling public health and law enforcement. In a 2019 commentary in the American Journal of Public Health, Benbow joined other AIDS researchers, bioethicists and a representative of the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors (NASTAD) in explaining how multiple aspects of existing HIV criminalization laws could confound public health goals around molecular surveillance.

Benbow and her coauthors cautioned that using identified surveillance data against the interest of patients, especially without informing them, “could jeopardize community confidence in public health agencies.” The authors also noted the CDC’s requirement that funded health departments create plans to address gaps in data protection and consider eliminating or modifying potentially counterproductive laws. “In light of the considerations we have addressed, health department leaders should consider supporting statutes that expressly limit, or even prohibit entirely, release of surveillance data for law enforcement purposes,” they wrote.

Mokotoff cautions that a health department can’t always change its state law. “But the health department can work with the community to help them understand what needs to be done and what kind of wording might be helpful,” she says. “We have to stop allowing surveillance data to be used for prosecution of people who are sick or infected.” Protecting that data from being used in law enforcement, she adds, “would change the entire discussion” with stakeholders in the HIV-positive community.

The CDC itself has avoided criticizing specific state laws, though the agency source told POZ that the CDC has worked with partners like NASTAD to review the range of legal protections, policies and procedures that can help protect HIV data. The source noted that in 2014, the Department of Justice recommended that states either reform their laws to eliminate HIV-specific criminal penalties or modernize their laws to reflect current scientific evidence. The source also pointed out that the Department of Health and Human Services 2019 initiative, “Ending the HIV Epidemic: A Plan for America,” encourages states to take similar steps to help reduce stigma.

Benbow conceded that addressing the intense mistrust of underserved individuals who may need HIV prevention or treatment services the most, including people who inject drugs and undocumented immigrants, remains a steep challenge. But identifying clusters, she says, could help health officials make the case for targeted services that benefit underserved people, like the legalization of needle exchange programs.

“A lot of what we do in public health infringes on privacy, and what we’re trying to do is balance a person’s individual freedoms and liberties and privacy with trying to improve public health and work for the common good,” Mayer says. “You really have to think very carefully about that because if you push that too far, then you’re likely to get a lot of public health interventions rolled back, and people don’t want to work with you. They don’t trust you.” And as the history of HIV shows, regaining lost trust can take decades.

New date for Beyond Blame: Challenging Criminalisation for HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE @ HIV2020 Online

New date – Wednesday 8 July 2020

Registration for Beyond Blame at HIV2020 Online now open

Last September, the nine organisations comprising the HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE Steering Committee announced that we had unanimously agreed to support HIV2020, and that Beyond Blame, our flagship meeting for activists, advocates, judges, lawyers, scientists, healthcare professionals and researchers working to end HIV criminalisation, would be integrated into the HIV2020 programme.

Now that the HIV2020 conference has been reimagined as a series of virtual convenings that will take place between July and October, we are delighted to announce that Beyond Blame: Challenging Criminalisation for HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE has been selected by the HIV2020 programme committee to take place on Wednesday 8 July 2020, from 3pm-5pm Central European Time.  See the time in your time zone here.

This year, the online version of Beyond Blame is a unique opportunity for both new and long-established activists to learn why HIV criminalisation matters, as well as hear about the wide range of initiatives and strategies that have been used by activists around the world to end the inappropriate use of criminal law to regulate and punish people living with HIV.

The first part of this interactive web show will be hosted by HJN’s Executive Director, Edwin J Bernard, and features interviews with various members of the HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE Steering Committee, as well as members of the HIV Justice Network’s Global Advisory Panel (GAP).

The second part of the session is an interactive Q&A, hosted by PWN-USA’s Naina Khanna. Throughout the session attendees will be further engaged with polls, video clips, and a surprise guest.

By the end of the session, attendees will be equipped with a greater understanding of the importance of HIV criminalisation, knowledge of strategies used for advocacy, and a set of follow-up actions.

Register now at HIV2020 Online

Programme (subject to change)

Welcome to Beyond Blame 2020

Edwin J Bernard (HJN)

“Nothing about us without us”

Sean Strub (Sero)

Women challenging HIV criminalisation in Africa

Michaela Clayton (GAP) and Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff (GAP)

The impact of HIV criminalisation on women and people who use drugs in EECA

Alexandra ‘Sasha’ Volgina (GNP+) and Svitlana ‘Sveta’ Moroz (Eurasian Women’s Network on AIDS / ICW)

Building networks to challenge criminalisation in Mexico and across Francophone Africa

Gonzalo Aburto (Sero) and Cécile Kazatchkine (Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network)

HIV criminalisation and key populations: who gets prosecuted, where, and why?

Cecilia Chung (Transgender Law Center / GAP), Jules Kim (Scarlet Alliance / GAP) and Elie Ballan (M-Coalition / GAP)

Bringing science to justice, and justice to science

Sally Cameron (HJN) and Alexander McClelland (GAP)

Interactive Q&A

Naina Khanna (PWN-USA) with Paul Kidd (HJN Supervisory Board)

Closing message

Edwin Cameron (former South African Constitutional Court Justice / GAP)

All virtual sessions offered as part of the HIV2020 Online series will be entirely FREE and made available later as recordings online. The webinar will be in English, but HIV2020 will provide simultaneous translation in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Russian.

Previous Beyond Blame meetings were held in Melbourne (2014), Durban (2016), and Amsterdam (2018).

In Amsterdam, more than 150 attendees from 33 countries attended the one-day meeting. Participation was extended to a global audience through livestreaming of the meeting on the HIV JUSTICE WORLDWIDE YouTube Channel.

US: New initiative to combat Anti-Black racism, end criminalisation of pandemics and abolish systems of imprisonment

Announcing the Health Not Prisons Collective

As Calls for Justice Echo Around the United States, National Groups Led by Most-Policed Communities Affected by HIV and COVID-19 Join in Partnership

The Health Not Prisons Collective Vows to Combat Anti-Black Racism, End Criminalization of Pandemics and Abolish Systems of Imprisonment

 June 18, 2020: The Health Not Prisons Collective is a new, three year national initiative of longtime collaborators led by, and accountable to, communities most affected by HIV criminalization in the United States: Counter Narrative Project, Positive Women’s Network – USA (PWN), Sero Project, Transgender Law Center, and the U.S. Caucus of People Living with HIV (The Caucus).

HIV criminalization is the wrongful use of a person’s HIV-positive status in a criminal prosecution, including charging people living with HIV (PLHIV) under HIV-specific criminal statutes, or under general criminal statutes, for behaviors which would not be crimes if the person did not have HIV. There is little legal or other support available for those charged with HIV crimes, yet the consequences of being charged under an HIV criminalization law are severe, even without conviction, and persist long after a person leaves the criminal justice system.

Collectively, and with steadfast allies, the founders of the Collective have pushed criminalization to the forefront of the HIV policy agenda. Now, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Collective will build the power of the intersectional national HIV movement led by Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), women, LGB people, and transgender and gender non-conforming people (TGNC) to refocus our efforts instead of blame, punishment and the denial of basic needs.

Criminalization is never a solution to health challenges. Communities that are already heavily surveilled, policed, and criminalized bear the brunt of HIV criminalization are at the highest risk of harm from COVID-19 related surveillance, policing, criminal charges and/or penalty enhancements. A response rooted in policing and criminalization not only undermines public health and human rights, but jeopardizes the long-term survival of our communities.

“The specifics of the COVID-19 pandemic may be unprecedented — but the racial disparities, intensification of stigma and marginalization, and threats of criminalization in the COVID-19 pandemic are sadly not unanticipated to those of us living with HIV,” said Andrew Spieldenner of the U.S. Caucus of People Living with HIV. “As we work together to overturn the criminalization of HIV baked into policies and laws decades ago, we will also urge our communities and leaders to repudiate the panic and reactive thinking that says police, prosecutors and prisons are the way to handle public health emergencies like COVID-19.”

With support from Gilead Sciences, the Collective’s three-year strategy incorporates political education and training; grassroots and grasstops organizing; policy analysis and advocacy; legal intervention; and narrative change designed to shift discourses about HIV, risk, blame, responsibility, and the role of the carceral state in public health, centering racial and gender justice.

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“Most HIV criminalization laws in the U.S. were established at a time when less was understood about HIV transmission. There’s no evidence it has ever contributed to HIV transmission reduction. Today, it directly contradicts current public health efforts to encourage people to know their HIV status and engage in health care and treatment; very few laws have been updated in light of advances in scientific advancements,” explained Tami Haught of Sero Project.

“We can’t stop HIV or COVID-19 criminalization without recognizing the underlying politics of racism, blame and bias that fuel them,” said Charles Stephens of Counter Narrative Project “Only a strategic and sustained movement led by those most targeted by criminalization ourselves and that changes the very narratives of blame in our society will overcome the root conditions that make it politically feasible to pin harm on vulnerable individuals from targeted communities.”

“Successful advocacy to end HIV criminalization requires centering PLHIV and those from overpoliced communities. Despite limited resources, members of the Collective have already had significant success in advancing the community and public discourse as well as influencing policy,” explained Cecilia Chung of Transgender Law Project. “We must now remove the remaining barriers that stop our leaders, including transgender and gender non-conforming Black and brown people, disabled people and others, from scaling up our movement and winning the freedom to thrive as we are.”

Due to lack of resources, work on HIV criminalization to date has largely been episodic, resulting in less coordination and varying results. This coordinated, strategic, multi-year effort will fill a critical gap at the nexus of policy, grassroots organizing, movement building, increasing political will to decriminalize, and culture change at a vital time. The Collective urges funders and people of privilege to invest in multi-year initiatives, honoring the passion and truths of communities with the resources it takes to rapidly scale efforts to win significant, lasting change.

“Our members are on the frontlines of pandemics, and they’re also deep in the resistance to overturn the system that profits from anti-Black racism and violence,” said Naina Khanna of Positive Women’s Network – USA. “We need to honor their commitment and vision with resources. Ongoing dedicated funded initiatives have the best chance to shift the social, legal and political landscape of our nation.”

 If you need help with a pandemic-related prosecution or threat, contact Sero Project for HIV-related issues and Community Resource Hub for COVID-19-related issues.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HEALTH NOT PRISONS COLLECTIVE HERE

The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation leads multi-state effort to decriminalise HIV and modernise laws leading to discrimination

The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation Launches Initiative for Modernization of Laws and Criminal Penalties for People Living with HIV

The Foundation partners with Gilead Sciences, Inc. and the Health Not Prisons Collective on a major, multi-state effort to decriminalize HIV and modernize laws that lead to the discrimination of people living with HIV.

LOS ANGELES, June 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) announced today a new national initiative focused on the modernization of criminal laws and penalties for people living with HIV. The effort will launch in partnership with Gilead Sciences, Inc., and a national alliance of advocacy partners including The Counter Narrative Project, Positive Women’s Network, The Sero Project, Transgender Law Center, and the US People Living with HIV Caucus. The Artemis Agency, a Los Angeles-based social impact firm, will be working with ETAF on the public education and awareness campaign. ETAF will also partner with state-based organizations as needed to ensure the initiative’s success.

Catherine Brown, ETAF Executive Director explains, “Very simply, science and the law have not caught up with each other on this issue, there is a disparity between what science tells us and what the laws and statutes in more than 30 states believe. HIV is not a crime, and those living with HIV are being held back by harmful laws and policies that discourage people from getting tested and treated.”

Gilead Sciences, Inc., a research-based biopharmaceutical company with headquarters in Foster City, California, is committed to the initiative and to supporting ETAF and The Health Not Prisons Collective.

“Gilead is proud to support this critical work against the criminalization of HIV,” said Brett Pletcher, Executive Vice President of Corporate Affairs and General Counsel. “These outdated and unjust laws disproportionately affect marginalized communities and further perpetuate the misinformation and stigma that result in decreased testing and poorer health outcomes. This collaborative initiative creates the possibility for systemic change that moves us closer to our collective vision of a more just society, free from discrimination and othering.”

On June 25th, ETAF will host a virtual town hall event to launch the initiative and address the effects of the current environment on the HIV community, as racial inequality and COVID-19 have disproportionately affected and threatened the lives of those who have been incarcerated as a result of their HIV status.

The campaign to modernize criminal laws and penalties that target people living with HIV will focus its initial efforts in Nevada and Ohio, where staffers will work with local advocates to prepare and introduce legislation. The effort also intends to address issues of insurance discrimination against people living with HIV in California, and will support legislation introduced in Missouri once COVID-19 restrictions are lifted for lawmakers in that state.

Read more about The Town Hall on July 25, 2020 and ETAF here: https://elizabethtayloraidsfoundation.org

More information about Gilead’s community work in HIV here: https://www.gilead.com/purpose/partnerships-and-community

About The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation
Working tirelessly on the AIDS crisis through the 1980s, Elizabeth Taylor established The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation (ETAF) in 1991 to reach her vision of an AIDS-free world. ETAF works to provide the direct care needed for people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS. Emphasizing Elizabeth’s commitment to marginalized communities, ETAF’s work ensures that HIV prevention education and access to treatment are available through domestic and international initiatives. HIV Decriminalization nationally, is ETAF’s primary advocacy initiative. We now have the necessary tools to stop the spread of HIV and end the AIDS crisis with sufficient resources.

Media Contacts
Catherine A. Brown
Executive Director
cbrown@etaf.org
310-339-3643

SOURCE The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation

When considering the criminalisation of COVID-19, lessons from HIV should be retained

Marginalised communities will not get justice from criminalising Covid-19 transmission

The criminalisation of the virus would create greater barriers to accessing healthcare systems already preventing many people from getting treatment.

After it was announced that no further action would be taken by police regarding the death of Belly Mujinga, a railway worker who contracted coronavirus after reportedly being spat on, there was national outcry. Her name has been plastered on placards at Black Lives Matter protests, while the public has pointed out that a man in Scotland who spat on a police officer while “joking” about coronavirus in April has been jailed for a year. But while this outrage is valid in the face of a government who continues to show their blatant disregard for black lives, criminalisation of diseases has been proven to be an ineffective tool for justice.

Over the past few months, parallels have been drawn between the Covid-19 pandemic and the HIV epidemic. Both viruses are communicable (they can be passed between people); both have been racialised, leading to racist and xenophobic attacks and stereotyping; community mobilisation has demanded adequate government public health responses for both health emergencies; and the impact of both viruses has highlighted the need for a global health approach which transcends borders. 

When the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic, many HIV organisations and activists advocated that the transmission of the novel coronavirus should not be criminalised. As public fear of Covid-19 grew, HIV advocates predicted the negative impact on public health and possibility of human rights violations, similar to those seen for people living with HIV. 

“Despite the evolving scientific knowledge, criminalisation laws have been written and implemented across the world faster than the development of the general understanding of the virus itself”

This strain of coronavirus is new and scientists are developing their understanding of it. In the past few weeks, there has been confusion about the probability of asymptomatic transmission (transmitting the virus when a person does not have Covid-19-like symptoms), as the WHO had previously commented that it was “very rare” and later stated that this wording had misled people. Despite the evolving scientific knowledge, criminalisation laws have been written and implemented across the world faster than the development of the general understanding of the virus itself. Globally, countries have implemented or have proposed laws against Covid-19 transmission and even exposure, without transmission, including Canada, France, India, and South Africa.

Often, the aim of criminalisation is to facilitate a tool for prevention and deterrence (to discourage people from passing on a virus) or as punishment for those who have or may have passed on a virus. HIV advocacy has illustrated over the years that the criminalisation of transmission or exposure is ineffective, and disproportionately impacts marginalised communities and negatively impacts public health.

In their Statement on Covid-19 Criminalisation, published in March, the HIV Justice Worldwide Steering Committee wrote that hastily drafted laws, as well as law enforcement, driven by fear and panic, are unlikely to be guided by the best available scientific and medical evidence – especially where such science is unclear, complex and evolving. “Given the context of a virus that can easily be transmitted by casual contact and where proof of actual exposure or transmission is not possible, we believe that the criminal justice system is unlikely to uphold principles of legal and judicial fairness, including the key criminal law principles of legality, foreseeability, intent, causality, proportionality and proof.”  

Since that statement was issued, internationally coronavirus laws have been weaponised against the most marginalised within society, as is the case with HIV criminalisation laws. The Ugandan government, for example, has used coronavirus laws to target marginalised LGBTQI+ groups, and in the UK, people of colour are fined more than the white population under coronavirus laws, in some cases leading to unlawful charges. In some cases people were even charged under the wrong law (e.g. enforcing Welsh law in England).

The director of legal services at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the public agency that conducts criminal prosecutions in England and Wales, found that 24% of cases reviewed had been charged incorrectly. In May a CPS press statement cited the speed and pressure to implement the laws as the cause of the wrongful charges. Across the Global North, it has been well documented that racialised communities are disproportionately impacted by Covid-19 and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation anticipates that LGBTQI communities will be disproportionately impacted by the virus. This is due to a myriad of reasons underpinned by systemic discrimination.

“Criminalisation of transmission or exposure is ineffective, and disproportionately impacts marginalised communities and negatively impacts public health”

HIV research has shown little evidence that criminalisation laws prevent transmission, in fact, it’s evidenced that such laws are bad for public health and fuel reluctance to get tested and treated. In the UK, testing and treatment of Covid-19 is free, as is the case with many other communicable diseases to remove the barrier to testing and treatment. Free testing and treatment access, irrespective of immigration status, is important, however, a briefing paper from Medact, Migrants Organise and New Economics Foundation (NEF), has shown that migrant communities blocked from healthcare because of the hostile environment, that “the coronavirus ‘exemption’ from charging and immigration checks is not working” and people have been asked to show their passports, and that people face additional obstacles such as language barrier and digital exclusion from emergency services. 

Criminalisation exacerbates public health issues: in a Channel 4 report, Migrants Organise spoke of a man who died at home for fear of being reported to immigration authorities if he accessed healthcare. The threat of immigration enforcement disproportionately impacts those in precarious work and those with precarious migration status, all of whom are more likely to come from racialised groups and in some cases groups which are hyper-surveilled and criminalised.

The role of healthcare and access to it needs to be reimagined, where people are viewed as patients not passports and healthcare professionals are not the extended arm of the Home Office. Governments must implement better employment rights, so that employers are held to account and do not put staff such as Belly Mujinga, in harmful positions. Governments must provide better statutory sick pay so those in precarious work do not have to choose between their health and putting food on the table. We need to overhaul systemically discriminatory processes that don’t look after the most vulnerable, rather than implementing laws – such as criminalisation – that will systematically punish them.