Human Rights Violations Fueling Spread of HIV in Former Soviet Union

Budapest, June 30, 2003 -- Governments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are fueling the world's fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemic by violating the human rights of injection drug users, sex workers, and other persons vulnerable to the disease, the Open Society Institute (OSI) and experts from 18 human rights and HIV organizations charged today.

The AIDS epidemic in the region is spreading more rapidly than in any other region, not just because injection drug use is involved, but because of the way injection drug users are treated under the law and by society,” said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of OSI's International Harm Reduction Development Program.

The experts, from 7 countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are participating in a three-day meeting to call attention to how human rights abuses accelerate the spread of HIV and impede treatment and prevention efforts. The rights violations include:

• police harassment of drug users and programs working to help them prevent HIV infection,
• mass arrests and long-term prison sentences for those caught with even small amounts of drugs,
• punitive use of tests for HIV or illegal drugs,
• and denial of HIV treatment to anyone with a history of injection drug use.

“Repressive measures such as mass arrests and forced HIV testing give the illusion of an effective government response, but in fact are counterproductive,” said Joanne Csete, Director of the HIV/AIDS and Human Rights Program of Human Rights Watch. “They succeed only in demonizing people who are at risk or infected, and driving them underground.”

An estimated 1.2 million people with HIV are now living in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. More than 90 percent of them were infected via injection drug use.

Russian Mandatory Testing Proposal Condemned

The activists and experts leveled particularly harsh criticism at a proposal by the Public Health Commission of the Moscow Duma that would require mandatory HIV and drug testing of injection drug users, sex workers, street children, the homeless, and others deemed to be at high risk. Moscow officials have dismissed concerns that mandatory testing would violate human rights, with Public Health Commission representative Ludmilla Stebenkova going so far as to declare that “democracy today is incompatible with public health.”

HIV and human rights experts here warned that mandatory testing would violate both the Russian constitution and the mandate of sound public health policy.

“Mandatory testing is a discredited strategy that has contributed much more to discrimination than to HIV prevention in countries around the world,” said Lev Levinson, an expert at the Moscow-based Human Rights Institute. “Mandatory testing violates the Russian constitution’s guarantees that medical tests be performed only with the consent of the individual. This is a return to a coercive Soviet-era policy that did not work then, and will not work now.”

A representative from a St. Petersburg program that works with both drug users and street children said that the measure would drive away precisely those who most need to be reached by HIV prevention programs.

“Drug users and sex workers are already afraid to come forward for help,” said Daniel Novichkov of Humanitarian Action. “Police take away their condoms or clean needles. Clinics refuse to treat them. Prisons are overflowing with people sentenced not only to time behind bars, but to an environment where HIV and tuberculosis are rampant.”

Novichkov said that, throughout the former Soviet Union, people with HIV face workplace discrimination, social stigma, and, in the case of drug users, routine denial of the limited antiretroviral treatments available. These rights violations undermine public health efforts.

“People think of drug users as isolated and expendable, but the reality is that they are woven into the fabric of our societies,” he said. “HIV has never observed neat social boundaries. By stigmatizing and isolating drug users, we condemn our whole region to death.”