Jordan: Jordan’s HIV deportation policy threatens lives

Foreigners Living with HIV in Jordan Face an Impossible Choice

Government Mandates Reporting HIV Status, Deports People Living with HIV.

In Jordan, medical professionals and health facilities are mandated to report an individual’s HIV status to the government. Foreign nationals found to be HIV-positive are summarily deported regardless of the consequences to their health and safety and banned for life from returning.

Earlier this year, an Iraqi gay man living with HIV fled to Jordan to escape persecution he faced at home for being gay, yet he could not access HIV treatment without being immediately deported. When his health rapidly deteriorated, he could not seek medical attention for fear of being deported. Whatever decision he made would threaten his life.

Jordan also obliges nationals to undergo HIV testing when seeking employment in the public sector and for non-nationals obtaining work permits, and denies them jobs if they are HIV-positive. It also requires testing for non-nationals renewing residency permits. For LGBT people living with HIV, the stigma and discrimination by medical professionals and employers often bars them from accessing basic rights, without any legal recourse.

Abdallah Hanatleh, executive director of “Sawaed,” an Amman-based organization that facilitates access to HIV treatment, told Human Rights Watch that his organization documents dozens of deportations based on HIV status annually.

Jordan is not alone in this abusive practice. Gulf states including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also deport people found to be HIV-positive without any provision for continuity of care. Worse yet, in Jordan, as in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, HIV-positive foreign nationals in the criminal justice system are denied adequate access to treatment in prison. “They are placed in solitary confinement, further isolating and stigmatizing them,” Hanatleh said.

International law prohibits deportations based solely on HIV status. Jordan should explicitly ban discrimination based on HIV status and stop deporting HIV-positive individuals under the principle of non-refoulement. This principle applies to asylum seekers and refugees, and for people with HIV, it means that governments are prohibited from returning them — depending on how advanced the disease — to places where they do not have adequate access to medical care and social support, or where they risk being subjected to persecution or degrading treatment on account of their HIV status.

Jordan should not mandate reporting of HIV status and employers should not be requiring HIV testing in the first place. People living with HIV should never be forced to forego lifesaving treatment in order to avoid deportation to danger.

Turkmenistan: New law provides free HIV treatment but mandates HIV testing prior to marriage, and for people who use drugs, prisoners, blood donors and foreigners seeking work visas.

Turkmenistan has passed a law under which all people seeking a marriage license must be tested for HIV.

The law implies that anyone found to be infected with the virus that is the precursor to AIDS would be denied a marriage license.

Reports in state-controlled media on April 6 said the law was enacted “in order to create conditions for forming healthy families and avert the birth of HIV-infected children.”

Authoritarian Turkmenistan has given little public information about the extent of HIV infection in the country.

The new law also requires HIV tests for anyone suspected of using narcotics, foreigners seeking work visas, prisoners, and blood donors.

Under the legislation signed by President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, the government will guarantee free treatment to people infected with AIDS.

In 2002, Turkmenistan’s Health Ministry claimed the country had only two cases of HIV and that both patients had been infected outside the Central Asian state.

Based on reporting by AP and AFP

South Korea: Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says mandating HIV testing only for foreigners is "discriminatory and an affront to..dignity"

A New Zealand woman’s rights were violated when her employers in the Republic of Korea demanded that, as a foreign English teacher, she undergo HIV/AIDS and drug tests as a condition of having her contract renewed, United Nations experts have found.

The Geneva-based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) was considering the case of the woman, whose contract was not renewed in 2009 after she refused to undergo a secondary mandatory HIV test required only of foreigners, arguing it was “discriminatory and an affront to her dignity.”

In a statement released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) today, CERD members noted that the Republic of Korea did not provide any reasons to justify the mandatory testing, from which Korean and ethnic Korean teachers were exempt.

They also noted that, during arbitration proceedings, the woman’s employers, the Uslan Metropolitan Office of Education (UMOE), said that HIV/AIDS tests were viewed as a means to check the values and morality of foreign English teachers.

The testing policy, the Committee wrote in its findings , “does not appear to be justified on public health grounds or any other ground, and is a breach of the right to work without distinction to race, colour, national or ethnic origin.”

The Committee called on the Republic of Korea to grant the woman adequate compensation for the moral and material damages she suffered. The Committee also urged the authorities to take steps to review regulations and policies related to the employment of foreigners and to abolish, in law and in practice, any legislation which creates or perpetuates racial discrimination.

“The Committee recommends the State party to counter any manifestations of xenophobia, through stereotyping or stigmatizing, of foreigners by public officials, the media and the public at large,” members wrote. The Committee has asked the Republic of Korea to inform it within 90 days of the steps it has taken.

In its submission to the Committee, the Republic of Korea said that, since 2010, its guidelines on the employment of foreign teachers do not specify that they have to submit results of HIV/AIDS and drugs tests to have their contracts renewed, and that mandatory testing is no longer required by the UMOE.