[img_assist|nid=215|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=75|height=100]I’m in day one of a Youth Summit at the UN Population Fund, and I’m pumped to meet the international youth delegation that’s been assembled. I’m curious as to how the summit planners are going to mobilize and equip such a disparate group for all the media and scheduling madness of any large international conference. More critically, though, I’m apprehensive and excited at discovering what exactly we’re facing in putting youth at the forefront of the UNGASS 06 agenda. It seems highly likely that the UNGASS review committee will face difficult political squabbling throughout the process with a US delegation that appears selected largely on political grounds, rather than on healthcare experience.
This clip includes the second portion of the question & answer session at the end of the presentation. It also includes closing remarks from Nils Daulaire.
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.
