"Ending AIDS requires evidence-informed, rights-based global leadership”. Photo: UNAIDS
When you hang around the United Nations long enough, you hear some of the strangest things. In the past few months, I’ve been following the process leading up to the UN High Level Meeting on Ending AIDS (8-10 June) in New York. In advance of the meeting, Member States of the UN have been negotiating a Political Declaration on Ending AIDS that’s supposed to represent the way forward. Though one might hope that such a global stocktaking would be dominated by conversations that move us toward a vision for “ending AIDS epidemic by 2020,” it has been quite the contrary. The space of diplomacy in 2016 is often rife with circular debates in which wealthy countries resist financial commitments for addressing key concerns, and evidence-informed information is contested by extremist politics and conservative ideas about gender, sex and sexuality.
In the current negotiations three disputes have reached new heights of absurdity: first, whether we can “name” the communities that are most affected by HIV globally - “key populations”- composed of men who have sex with men [MSM], transgender women, drug users and sex workers; second, whether evidence supports the claim that gender-based violence increases women’s and key populations’ vulnerability to HIV; and third, whether we can name “comprehensive sexuality education” as one important strategy to reduce vulnerability to HIV and increase access to services. The debates illustrate a toxic combination of cowardice, misogyny, homo-and trans-phobia, religious fundamentalism, and a closing of space for realistic discussion of how to solve pressing global challenges by governments and civil society together.
