Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival debuts at AIDS 2014 in Melbourne, first ever film festival to focus on HIV criminalisation

In the lead-up to AIDS 2014, ten powerful thought-provoking films from seven countries over three days (18, 19 and 21 July 2014) will outrage Melbourne film-goers by exploring how laws and policies aimed at controlling, punishing or disempowering specific groups of people living with, or at risk of HIV, harms not only human rights, but also the broader response to the HIV epidemic.

Curated by international HIV activist Edwin Bernard, co-ordinator of the HIV Justice Network, the Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival is presented in partnership with ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Victorian AIDS Council and Living Positive Victoria.

The Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival includes four themed sessions: Women’s Injustices; Challenging HIV Criminalisation; Australian Responses to HIV Injustices; and Activism Against HIV Injustices.

“As the AIDS 2014 ‘Melbourne Declaration’ shines a spotlight on HIV injustices at the conference, the Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival‘s films, director Q&As, and panel discussions, will reveal the real stories behind the stigmatising mainstream media headlines, hopefully changing hearts and minds so that people understand why it’s important to advocate for change,” says the festival’s curator, Edwin Bernard, whose HIV Justice Network campaigns for an end to inappropriate uses of criminal laws to regulate and punish people living with HIV.

The Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival includes films never seen before in Australia and visits countries as diverse as Canada and Cambodia. “I hope that the sophisticated Melbourne cinema audience will be interested in challenging themselves to learn more about the forced HIV testing and imprisonment of a group of disenfranchised women in Greece, who were scapegoated by a cynical government trying to win votes in the 2012 election (in Zoe Mavroudi’s ‘Ruins: Chronicle of an HIV Witch-Hunt‘) or the harrowing impact of state-sponsored homophobia on the lives gay men and women in Jamaica (in Micah Fink’s ‘The Abominable Crime’),” says Edwin Bernard.

Other HIV criminalisation-related films include Positive Women: Exposing Injustice (Canada, 2012); Mark S King: HIV Criminalization Face-Off (US, 2012); HIV is Not a Crime (US, 2011); and How could she go on living as if weren’t there (Sweden, 2010).

“After each screening we’ll also be hearing from the film-makers themselves, many of whom are coming to Melbourne to talk about why they were outraged enough by these HIV injustices to make these films,” notes Bernard, whose own film ‘More Harm Than Good‘ is showing alongside three other short films that explore why a criminal justice approach to HIV prevention is hurting the HIV response.

“The moving image is a powerful expression of human experience. Through a diversity of perspectives, opinion, ideas, stories and images, the moving image helps us make sense of ourselves and our world through dynamic social, cultural and creative exchange. We’re delighted to have worked with our partners to present a compelling programme of cinema and talks focused on such a critical and important issue”. Helen Simondson, ACMI Public Programs Manager.

“This festival will, for the first time in Melbourne, bring together activist voices from around the world showing powerful work that highlights the injustice of HIV related discrimination,” says Simon Ruth, Chief Executive Officer of the Victorian AIDS Council. “Through documentary and drama, the diversity of the films is compelling, moving and ultimately inspiring.”

Punitive laws and policies aimed at controlling, punishing or disempowering specific groups of people living with, or at risk of HIV, is a hot topic and central theme of AIDS 2014, the much anticipated meeting of the International AIDS Society and largest international conference ever to be held in Melbourne.

“HIV justice is a key issue for people living with HIV in Melbourne as it is in many places around the world where even worse laws exist. Victoria still has punitive laws in place that we are fighting to have repealed. Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival takes advantage of AIDS 2014 to bring broader awareness of the damaging impact of unfair laws about HIV,” says Brent Alan, Executive Officer of Living Positive Victoria. “I hope as many Victorians as possible take advantage of the marvellous programme Edwin has curated to be presented in Melbourne’s home of cinema, ACMI.”

For more information and bookings visit www.outragefilmfestival.com or http://www.acmi.net.au/justice-film-festival-2014.aspx.

MEDIA ANNOUNCEMENT – Outrage HIV Justice Film Festival 18-21 July 2014

Flat funding, harsh laws could hurt Uganda's battle against HIV

KAMPALA, 25 June 2014 (IRIN) – Inadequate funding coupled with harsh laws targeting same sex unions could erode the gains so far made in the fight against HIV in Uganda, activists warn.

The AMA Adopts a Resolution Opposing HIV Criminalization

The Center for HIV Law and Policy is a national legal and policy resource and strategy center working to reduce the impact of HIV on vulnerable and marginalized communities and to secure the human rights of people affected by HIV.

HIV Criminalization: A Physician's Perspective

This essay is an excerpt from the LGBT/HIV criminal justice report, A Roadmap for Change: Federal Policy Recommendations for Addressing the Criminalization of LGBT People and People with HIV. His name was Paul. I slid into the chair next to him in my examination room to console him as he cried.

HIV is not a Crime 2014 – the first HINAC aka The Grinnell Gathering (My Fabulous Disease, US, 2014)

Mark S. King (My Fabulous Disease) reports from the first HIV is Not a Crime conference, held in Grinnell, Iowa in 2014 in a moving video that includes interviews with people living with HIV who have been prosecuted.

US: On eve of national HIV criminalisation conference Iowa's remarkable advocacy success is the model for other states to follow

If Gov. Terry Branstad signs Senate File 2297 on Friday as planned, Iowa will become the first state in the country to repeal and replace its criminal transmission of HIV law, activists say.

The law being reformed had been on the books since 1998. A broad coalition of groups, led by the Community HIV and Hepatitis Advocates of Iowa Network (CHAIN), has been working for the past five years to modernize it.

Advocates said the new law better reflects advances in science, medicine and understanding of how HIV is transmitted.

Until now, Iowa has had one of the harshest HIV transmission laws in the country. Under the 1998 law, persons with HIV could face 25 years in prison and inclusion on the sex offender registry if they could not prove they disclosed their status to a sexual partner — even if no transmission occurred and precautions such as condoms were used.

Under the new law, there is a tiered penalty system, which takes into account whether a person took precautions, whether transmission of HIV actually occurred and whether or not the person intended to transmit HIV.

The new law also adds other infectious diseases to the bill such as hepatitis, tuberculosis and meningococcal disease, which causes meningitis — so the law is no longer HIV-specific.

Finally, it removes the requirement those convicted register as sex offenders, and it will allow people convicted under the old law to be expunged from the registry.

Both the Iowa House and Senate unanimously approved the bill this year, a stark contrast to the four previous years, when similar bills languished in the legislature.

“You have to be in it for the long haul. It’s not an easy process,” CHAIN community organizer Tami Haught said of the group’s lobbying efforts. “We’re still dealing with a lot of the stigma that was around in the ’80s.”

She said when activists set out to change the law five years ago, they hoped to simply see the criminalization law repealed. But that wasn’t palatable to some lawmakers and county prosecutors, who said they still wanted to hold people with HIV accountable for protecting their sexual partners.

Finding ways to compromise was key to getting the sweeping bipartisan support needed, Haught said. Other tactics included meeting frequently with lawmakers, engaging in community education and gathering as many organizations to voice their support as possible.

CHAIN partnered with groups ranging from the Iowa Attorney General’s Office and the Iowa Department of Health to the League of Women Voters, the Family Planning Council and the Interfaith Alliance.

“We were up at the capitol almost every day it was in session talking with legislators. and that’s what needed to happen,” Haught said. “In 2014, maybe there was only one legislator who was not familiar with the law. When we started, a majority of legislators didn’t even know the law existed.”

NATIONAL ACTIVISTS LOOK TO IOWA

CHAIN’s tactics will be on display next week. The changes to Iowa’s law made national news, and activists hope to replicate those efforts in other states.

National group the Sero Project, founded by Iowa City native Sean Strub, is organizing a conference, HIV Is Not a Crime, to be held in Grinnell starting on Monday of next week.

Numerous laws similar to Iowa’s were passed in different parts of the country in the late 1990s in the wake of a high profile 1996 incident in New York. In that case, a man was charged with intentionally infecting 13 women and girls with HIV.

Additional pressure came from the federal government, which at the time required states to have an HIV transmission law on the books to access federal funding for HIV prevention and treatment through the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act.

Today, there are 34 states with a HIV-specific criminalization on the books. Only two had harsher penalties than Iowa. Now, Iowa has become a model for how change could happen elsewhere.

When they started work on the conference, organizers were hoping for perhaps 50 people to attend. As of earlier this week, more than 170 activists from across the United States and four other countries have signed up to spend June 2 through 5 to learn and share lobbying and education techniques related to HIV transmission decriminalization.

“We wanted to bring advocates to one place and give them the tools to go home and try to modernize the laws,” Haught said.

Foremost of those tools should be a willingness for people living with HIV to share their own stories, she said.

“We need to speak up and show we are your neighbors, your friends, your family members,” she said. “Sharing our stories had a great impact on legislators.”

Some of those who has shared their stories include Iowans convicted under the 1998 law. One of those is Donald Bogardus, 43, of Waterloo.

GETTING HIS LIFE BACK

Bogardus was convicted under the old law after authorities said he had unprotected sex with a man three times in 2009.

The man didn’t contract HIV. Bogardus had an undetectable viral load, which means the virus could not be detected in his blood.

People with an undetectable viral load have almost no chance of transmitting the virus. The new law takes that into consideration when sentencing — the old law did not.

“It was not my intent to hurt him by far,” Bogardus said in a video the Sero Project made to tell his story. “The reason I didn’t disclose was I was afraid of rejection. I was afraid of being talked about. I was afraid of losing a friend.”

He spent two months in prison — he was facing 25 years — before receiving a suspended sentence in February, with two to five years of probation. He also had to register as a sex offender, which meant he lost his job as a certified nursing assistant at Country View, a Black Hawk County-owned nursing and mental health care center.

Now that his name will be taken off the registry, effective July 1, he’s hopeful he will be able to return to his old job.

“It has lifted a burden off of me. I’m just being able to get my life back,” he told The Gazette. “I felt like I was in a big cage, and now I feel some relief.”

He also believes the changed law will encourage more people to get tested in the first place because, under the old law, the only defense was not knowing you were HIV positive. The new law also encourages behavior public health officials are pushing, Haught said.

“Now we are incentivizing doing the right thing. If you are taking your medication and using protection, you can’t be prosecuted,” she said.

She said she wants HIV to be treated just as any other communicable disease.

“We’re hoping this will help reduce the stigma associated with being HIV positive and encourage testing and treatment,” she said.

Read more: http://thegazette.com/subject/news/new-hiv-transmission-law-makes-iowa-model-for-nation-20140529#ixzz33CDVnzKV

Australia: Campaign against Victoria’s HIV-specific criminal law launched to tie in with Melbourne Declaration for AIDS 2014

Living Positive Victoria, the organisation representing people living with HIV in the Australian state of Victoria, has launched a campaign for community and cross-party political support to reform the state’s HIV-specific criminal law, the only such law in Australia.

Section 19a of the Crimes Act 1958,’ Intentionally causing a very serious disease’ states

A person who, without lawful excuse, intentionally causes another person to be infected with a very serious disease is guilty of an indictable offence.

In subsection (1) very serious disease means HIV within the meaning of section 3(1) of the Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 .

The statute, which treats HIV as exceptional and applies a uniquely higher penalty than for other crimes of violence, carries a 25 year maximum penalty.

The call for law reform is a response to the release of the Melbourne Declaration in advance of the 20th International AIDS conference, also known as AIDS 2014, to be held in Melbourne in late July.

“Leading into AIDS 2014 is a highly opportune moment to grasp the issue of law reform so that HIV is treated as a public health matter,” says Ian Muchamore, President of Living Positive Victoria.

The Melbourne Declaration focuses on the need to address multiple legal barriers in the global HIV response, in order “to defeat HIV and achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support”.

In line with the Oslo Declaration on HIV Criminalisation, it explicitly states that “nobody should be criminalized because they are living with HIV.” And elsewhere the Declaration “expresses concern at the continued enforcement of discriminatory, stigmatizing, criminalizing and harmful laws which lead to policies and practices that increase vulnerability to HIV.”

HIV criminalisation is set to be a major focus of international attention at AIDS 2014. Living Positive Victoria is one of the hosts of the Beyond Blame pre-conference (along with Victorian AIDS Council/Gay Men’s Health Centre, National Association of People Living with HIV Australia and Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations) which is supported by the AIDS and Rights Alliance of Southern Africa, Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, Global Network of People Living with HIV, HIV Justice Network, International Community of Women Living with HIV, Sero Project and UNAIDS.

Read and sign the Melbourne Declaration here

Read and sign the Oslo Declaration here

Read the Living Positive Victoria press release here

Register for Beyond Blame: Challenging HIV Criminalisation (July 20th, Melbourne) here

Uganda: Parliament passes ‘deeply flawed’ HIV law, takes ‘giant leap backwards’: urge President Museveni to veto

After years of intensive debate and strong local and international advocacy against many of the problematic clauses found within Uganda’s omnibus HIV law, yesterday Uganda’s Parliament passed the HIV Prevention and Control Act virtually unchanged from this 2010 version.

The bill includes mandatory HIV testing for pregnant women and their partners, and allows medical providers to disclose a client’s HIV status to others. The bill also criminalises ‘wilful and intentional’ HIV transmission, attempted transmission, and behaviour that might result in transmission by those who know their HIV status.  There are some excellent analyses of the problematic provisions at The Observer (Uganda) and the Science Speaks blog.

Clauses 39 (‘attempted transmission of HIV’) and 41 (‘intentional transmission of HIV’) were adopted in the debate last week, as were clauses 13, 14 and 15 on mandatory and routine testing, with unverified reports that the ambit of clause 13 (‘HIV testing for purposes of criminal proceedings’) was broadened further. (Follow Parliament Watch Uganda [@pwatchug] on Twitter for latest details of the actual text).

Today, two press releases from Human Rights Watch, HEALTH Global Advocacy Project, and Uganda Network on Law, Ethics & HIV/AIDS (UGANET) and The International Community of Women Living with HIV (ICW) condemned the passage of the law in the strongest terms. They are likely to be the first of many.

“This HIV bill is yet another step backward in the fight against AIDS in Uganda,” said Maria Burnett, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “It is founded on stigma and discrimination and based on approaches that have been condemned by international health agencies as ineffective and violating the rights of people living with HIV.”

Mandatory HIV testing and the disclosure of medical information without consent are contrary to international best practices and violate fundamental human rights, the three groups said. The criminalization of HIV transmission, attempted transmission, and behavior that might result in transmission by those who know their HIV status is overly broad, and difficult to enforce.

[…]

“For Uganda to address its HIV epidemic effectively, it needs to partner with people living with HIV, not blame them, criminalize them, and exclude them from policy making,” said Dorah Kiconco, executive director of Uganda Network on Law, Ethics & HIV/AIDS. “The president should not sign this bill and instead ensure a rights-based approach, recognizing that people living with HIV will prevent transmission if they are empowered and supported.”

[…]

“At the upcoming international AIDS conference, Uganda will be the example to all the countries gathered of how not to write laws on the HIV response,” said Asia Russell, international policy director at Health GAP (Global Access Project). “Parliamentarians are doing precisely the opposite of what Uganda should be doing to fight HIV.”

ICW’s press release is below

Today’s passage of the HIV Prevention and AIDS Control Bill represents a dangerous backslide in Uganda’s efforts to respond to HIV. While the bill may have been intended to facilitate and improve the HIV response in Uganda, the bill contains many poorly conceived and fear- induced provisions that have no place in a public health and human-rights-based response to HIV. As passed, this bill will actually weaken Uganda’s HIV prevention efforts and will have a detrimental and disproportionate impact on the rights of women and girls and in particular women living with HIV.

The International Community of Women Living with HIV Eastern Africa is extremely concerned about the devastating impact this law will have on the daily lives of women in Uganda. “It is disappointing that the Members of Parliament that we have engaged for so long, have ignored all the evidence, science and reason that we advanced as civil society organisations together with technocrats and scientists and chose instead, to act out of fear and unfounded hysteria – betraying the very will of the people that elected them to Parliament to represent their issues” said Lillian Mworeko, Regional Coordinator ICW EASTERN AFRICA.

The bill includes outdated and dangerous provisions for mandatory testing for pregnant women and their partners under Clause 14 (b) and (c). Mandatory testing of people living with HIV is a violation of fundamental human rights and accepted principles of informed consent and will negatively impact antenatal care attendance. Women—who will likely be the frequent target of these provisions— will shy away from hospitals and medical services. The devastating result will be that more children will be infected through mother to child transmission of HIV. Uganda is currently making strong strides towards zero infections from mother to child through use of proven strategies that emphasize voluntary counseling and testing. But Uganda’s gains could be lost if women are forced to test every time they visit a health facility. HIV testing of pregnant women, their partners and victims of sexual offenses must always be voluntary and conducted with informed consent.

“The fact that Uganda is even considering mandatory testing of pregnant women or victims of sexual offenses, represents a major step backwards for a country which showed early promise as an effective responder to HIV. Unfortunately, fear and ignorance have won the day in Uganda.” said Jessica Whitbread, Global Director of the International Community of Women Living with HIV.

Despite growing international consensus that criminalization is actually counter productive to the HIV prevention strategies, the Bill creates unnecessary and ill-advised additional criminal laws that criminalize attempted and intentional transmission of HIV. The International Community of Women living with HIV unequivocally opposes the criminalization of HIV status. The existing penal code already includes sufficient provisions to address criminal acts, creating additional parallel set of laws will just serve to persecute and punish people living with HIV. Criminalization will disproportionately impact women, who are more likely to know their HIV status through pregnancy related medical care. This provision will do little else but result in increased stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV, which are key drivers of the HIV epidemic.

Furthermore, the bill empowers medical workers to disclosure a person’s HIV sero status to a third party. Clause 21 (e); “where any other person with whom an HIV infected person is in close or continuous contact including but not limited to a sexual partner, if the nature of contact, in the opinion of the sexual medical practitioner, poses a clear and present danger of HIV transmission to that person;” Not only is this provision a clear violation of human rights and confidentiality but it is ripe for abuse by medical workers. Disclosure by medical workers of a person’s HIV status based purely on an individual opinion represents an institutionalized form of stigma and discrimination and dramatically increases the likelihood of violence against women living with HIV.

These poorly considered provisions at their best violate human rights and enshrine stigma and discrimination into law and at their worst will cause many people to shy away from accessing programs that work, such as prevention, treatment and care and support services including elimination of mother to child transmission services (eMTCT). Sadly, this bill undermines the very services that Uganda needs more than any other country in the world.

“Uganda is already facing a serious backslide from its early advances in responding to HIV, Uganda is currently one of three African countries experiencing increases in their HIV prevalence rates previously from 6.5% to 7.3 %. The passage of this Bill will only serve to increase this backslide and the President must save Uganda from this backlash”, says Margaret Happy, the Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights Officer, ICW Eastern Africa.

ICW Eastern Africa urges His Excellency Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, the President of Uganda, to rise above all and not assent to this Bill which is in contradiction of the commitments made by his wise assent to the East African Community HIV & AIDS Prevention and Management Act, 2012 .