Healthyvives Health Blog

The fear generated by the HIV epidemic has not helped the cause of HIV/AIDS patients. Sex workers, gay men and drug users who are the first to be infected by HIV are already targets of punitive legal provisions’.

Protective and Supportive Legal Framework
The law can and must be used to establish a protective and supportive framework for people affected by the epidemic and not a punitive one.

• The element of collaboration and mutual support that emphasizes the common interest between the infected and the uninfected and between the government and individuals is essential. Creating a supportive legal environment can involve both negative and positive legal interventions.

The negative interventions arise from the need of an absence of law in some contexts. The laws which we do not need are the laws that discriminate against the people with HIV, which distance them from their communities and which makes it less likely that people will share in the common interests to reduce the effects of the epidemic.
Then there are positive legal interventions that can actively promote the supportive environment. These legal interventions include:

• Human rights laws that give legal effect to rights such as the right to privacy, the right to protection against unlawful search and seizure and rights to protection against unlawful detention.
• Anti-discrimination laws that will provide redress in the event of discrimination, housing, access to health care, etc., against people with HIV or their family or friends.
• Legal provisions that protect the confidentiality of a person with HIV status.
• Laws compelling a person’s consent to be taken before HIV testing is undertaken.
• Laws that encourage appropriate workplace practices, e.g, infection control procedures and HIV education for employees.
Ethics and Law
It has become common to talk about law and ethics in the context of HIV policy. This is done for obvious reasons because the ethical dilemmas that arise are invariably played odt in legal terms. Nonetheless, the blurring of the distinction between law and ethics can sometimes obscure the fact that tensions may exist between ethical imperatives and legal obligations. It is, therefore, worthwhile considering the interaction between law, ethics and HIV.