Alliance India takes its policy messages to UN high-level meeting
29 July 2008
Today’s leaders must be bold enough to show that every human being matters and not discriminate between “deserving” and “undeserving” people living with HIV. This was the message from Alliance India’s Sonal Mehta at the 2008 UN high-level meeting on AIDS in New York in June.
Sonal, Alliance India’s director of policy and communications, spoke as the civil society representative on the panel discussion, The challenges of providing leadership and political support in countries with concentrated epidemics. She explained how key populations living with HIV face “triple stigma” because of living with HIV; because of being, for example, a sex worker, a prisoner, or a drug user; and because of their involvement or association with illegal activities.
She appealed to leaders to look at these groups as citizens and to support them to enjoy their civil rights to ensure longer-term health and wellbeing. Money spent on human rights, she argued, is money spent on human development.
Sonal also highlighted how, in many countries, HIV response grants are being diverted to health systems strengthening. While public health systems must be strong and responsive, resources for HIV should not be cut to fund this.
The contribution of the AIDS response to the health sector also needs to be documented and acknowledged. Because of the response, she argued, many countries have started questioning the laws that keep drug users away from harm reduction strategies and that criminalize sex work and same-sex behaviour. Community mobilisation is equally important in setting up state-of-the-art service centres, she said.
Alliance members from Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine and the UK joined Sonal at the meeting, where the Alliance held a well-attended side event on meeting targets for marginalised communities.
For Alliance India, the high-level meeting was an opportunity to profile its policy work, as well as to get a better understanding of international priorities and how they influence local level work.
