Ahead of World AIDS Day, taking place on December 1 every year, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) released a report Take the Right Path to End AIDS on November 26, 2024. The report focuses on a human rights-based approach in ending the AIDS pandemic.
The report includes global statistics, mainly focusing on regional issues. It also addresses several key topics: equality and nondiscrimination, participatory rights, human rights of women and girls, protection of children, and physical and mental health.
The limited data on Turkmenistan underlined continuous discriminatory attitudes towards people living with HIV – a stagnant position shared among the Central African Republic, Comoros, Ghana, India, Liberia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Nepal.
According to The Urgency Now, another UNAIDS report, over 80% of the population in Turkmenistan (aged 15 – 49) hold discriminatory attitudes towards people living with HIV (2019 – 2023), a consistent trend since 2005. Turkmenistan does not report statistics to UNAIDS.
The report points out an overall dire tendency in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EE-CA), underlining the urgent need to address the existing HIV-related stigma, discrimination and violence:
- more than half of surveyed people living with HIV experience stigma from external sources, such as in legal, workplace or health-care settings.
- female sex workers experience sexual violence more frequently than women from other key populations.
- people living with HIV in EE-CA countries with high rates of criminal convictions for HIV exposure, nondisclosure, or transmission, are nearly five times more likely to experience stigma from the legal system and more than twice as likely to face stigma in the workplace compared to people living with HIV in countries with less restrictive laws.
- the LGBTQ+ people are more severely under attack, especially in Central Asia.
- incarceration costs are 1.2 to 15 times higher than the costs of providing harm reduction and social services for people who use drugs.
- HIV treatment coverage to all people living with HIV is significantly lower in the region.
The report also highlighted the role regional bodies play in building and strengthening regional consensus on important human rights issues and provided examples of positive developments, such as a recently established task force of a community-based and key population-led partnership aimed at driving accountability for achieving 10-10-10 targets, with support from UNAIDS and UNDP.
Finally, the report provides a roadmap for action for governments to put human rights at the centre of efforts to end AIDS as a public health threat:
- Take a systematic, evidence-driven and community-led approach to human rights and HIV;
- Align laws and policies with human rights commitments;
- Fund human rights defenders and advocates;
- Take action to ensure the long-term sustainability of HIV financing;
- Ensure community-led responses and human rights defenders have sufficient civic space to lead efforts to centre human rights in the HIV response;
- Mainstream human rights commitments and expertise and apply an equity lens across the breadth of the HIV response;
- Translate commitments on gender equality and HIV into reality;
- Unite with allies within and beyond the health sector;
- Ensure accountability for adherence to HIV-related human rights commitments and end impunity for human rights violations.
