We welcome Mark, Tabris and Tsholo who this week have journeyed to New York to attend the UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on HIV/AIDS. They will be covering the meetings, NGO briefings and rallies live and providing you with a first-hand look at these global meetings from their perspectives having travelled from all around the world, linking what they see at the UN with their work fighting HIV back home. Last week we asked them to write something before coming to New York to introduce them to our readers. The next three blog entries are those introductions. Starting tomorrow, they'll be posting live -- and lively commentary. Register now, login, and comment to dialogue with these three dedicated people. Thanks to Advocates for Youth for their help in coordinating this special coverage.
It’s now only one day until I travel to New York City for the UNGASS meeting and its starting to show. I’m becoming increasingly apprehensive and nervous; the potential for real commitment and action, as well as for more continued bureaucratic wrangling, is currently hanging tenuously in the balance.
During my day job, I work for a development agency which has a lovely modern office with lots of lovely, educated, passionate mostly-Western professionals who seem to be forever coming back from Sudan or flying out to Haiti.
I am Tabris from Perú. I feel happy for this opportunity of representing young people from my country.
If in fact in my country there are laws that ensure rights of people living with HIV/AIDS, they are not often fulfilled, and regardless, teenagers and young people are not covered by such legislation. I want to share the need that young people have for real spaces to talk and reflect about sexuality, sexualities, gender equality and human rights with peers and adults.
This Saturday 27th May 2006 I see myself travelling for the first time to the US and as exciting as this may seem, my visit there will be a little different.
As a youth delegate at this years UNGASS review meeting I expect to get a clearer and better way forward to the 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS especially on issues relevant to youth, their programmes, policies and further advocate for change in funding policies/procedures.
As a young person growing up in a country with one of the highest prevalence rates in the world is one of the toughest things a young women trying to establish herself should have to face. Botswana has a population of 1.7 million with a prevelance rate of 17.1% in 2004 (NACA).
This Memorial Day we remember 25 million souls lost to 25 years of AIDS. Motivated by the death of the love of my early life in 1996 from AIDS, I started thinking about death politically.Carl died just months before medications the developed world takes for granted became available, and months after the US Navy denied him compassionate access to those meds after a five-year study in which he participated. Months meant the difference in him seeing his two sons grow up and our lives continuing together.
In 1997, I began a journey working with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Law, culminating early this year in the US Supreme Court affirming Oregon’s law 6-3: the federal government had no right to interfere in a doctor or pharmacist’s compassionate decision to alleviate suffering at the request of the patient. Strict safeguards make that once controversial law a model of compromise among medical, legal, political, ethics, policy, mental health, faith, hospice, and most importantly, patient and family communities. Compromise works.
Five years ago, the United Nations General Assembly held a special session on HIV/AIDS.This was the first time all UN members had convened under the auspices of the General Assembly to address a specific health issue.In view of the staggering nature of the pandemic, the member states adopted in 2001 a 10-year plan, known as the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS – to guide international effort to stem the spread of the disease and care for those infected by it.From May 31-June 2, the international community will convene once again to take stock of progress in implementing the action plan, evaluate successful and unsuccessful efforts, and chart a course for the future.
A new report comes from the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition as covered in the Washington Post, “UN Releases Report on AIDS Treatment.”The report, Missing the Target: Off Target for 2010 – details how the global community is behind in reaching its goals for treatment distribution and research.
The report cites evidence of progress as well as impediments in various countries, and it takes each major program involved in the fight to task. Specifically, the report states that The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), “has expanded the reach of its treatment delivery and has initiated a variety of activities to build health systems. While continuing these efforts it must, however, end counterproductive policy prescriptions that undermine service delivery and do more to build human resources capacity in countries.”
In the lead-up to next week’s meeting on HIV/AIDS at the UN, a recent AFP article, “Thrown out of home, Nigerian women find solace in sisterhood,” is an apt reminder of the special challenges that so many women face in protecting themselves from infection when they have so little decision-making power in their relationships and in their lives. The article narrates the plight of 70 female divorcees gathered at a vocational training and support class in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, where Shari’ah Islamic law has been in place since 2000, and where girls often have little say in when and whom they marry.
Using misinformed arguments and political concerns, the House Appropriations committee rejected an amendment by a vote of 23-30 to direct funds already in the bill to UNFPA’s obstetric fistula prevention and treatment efforts, should the Administration not release the funds for other family planning and women’s empowerment efforts.Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick offered this compromise amendment to allow US support to UNFPA for very specific and non-controversial programs, as a constructive response to the Administration blocking the funding for the past four years.
Opponents said that inclusion of this amendment would “make it difficult to pass” the Foreign Operations bill on the floor – so much for meeting the public health needs of some of the world’s poorest women.Others threw their standard complaint into the mix, stating that this (in an extremely circuitous way) somehow supports abortion.
