Religious activists leave AIDS conference worried about funding but committed to continue efforts

In the last of our items feeding back on the 18th International AIDS Conference, we present the feedback from Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance, who were the official coordinators of the Faith Based Responses to HIV & AIDS represented at the conference.

While faith based organisations (FBOs) and faith community responses to the pandemic seem to have been well represented, well listened to and more integrated into the main programme at this conference than in previous years, there has been a real sense that the tide has turned in turns of international funding commitments, and that we will be ploughing on with our work, doing more with fewer resources than before.

There are also cries for more coordinated responses from faith communities at future conferences and summits on HIV & AIDS so that we can bring our voice ever more clearly to the public debate on AIDS strategy.

So - doing more with less and making ourselves heard better seem to be the main challenges coming from the EAA - from CHAA a recognition that the Western, secular discourse on AIDS is missing the realities on the ground that faith based responses deal with day-to-day, and from ICMDA a question mark over the current, highly individualistic and Western emphasis on a rights based approach to care and prevention.

As Bishop Yvette Flunder, senior pastor of the City of Refuge United Church of Christ in San Francisco said "this work is not for wimps”!

Report on XVIIIth International AIDS Conference #AIDS2010

The XVIIIth International AIDS conference in Vienna, Austria told a story of measured progress in responses to the challenges of the epidemic. There were encouraging news on the development of microbicides, early signs of lives saved by the PMTCT programs and better more informed science that indicated that there may be further major steps available.

The conference was titled “Rights Here, Rights Now”. Obviously there was a major emphasis on a human rights response to the epidemic. Yet there was correspondingly much less on the importance of partnerships. The role of faith based organisations was little voiced, even though in many countries they provide approximately half of the health services.

A human rights framework has been helpful in many areas in acting as an umbrella that has allowed many groups to move forward. Yet it now seems to have over extended its clam for adherence. While there was discussion of the risk of ideologically driven responses to the disease, there was little recognition of the limitations of the ideology of human rights. An ideology is a set of aims and ideas that directs one's goals, expectations, and actions.

Human rights affirms an individualistic response to treatment options. The individual is assumed to have agency. And while this may well resonate in international conference settings, it often is little understood in rural village settings, where the individual has little power to bring about needed change, and where the power of fear greatly overwhelms externally derived science and knowledge.

For those who hold to a Christian ideology that has made enormous contributions to the provision of health services throughout the world, our response to an exclusively human rights approach needs to be carefully considered. A human rights approach, in one form seems to affirm that a commercial sex worker can only best become a human rights empowered sex worker. There is a deficiency in vision, a restriction a limitation to a human rights ideologically driven approach to disease. Christianity offers so much more.

Michael Burke

ICMDA HIV Initiative

Collision of Worlds at Vienna’s World AIDS Conference

Rev Alan Bain of the Christian HIV/AIDS Alliance: writes a blog post from his time at the recent World AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Commenting on the cultural programme and the emphasis of the conference, Rev. Bain says

the schizophrenic attitude to the disease here in the West, where our loss of long dead pop stars and the almost glamorous dimension of AIDS now takes higher priority than 40 million infected people living with HIV throughout the world.

The big challenge for Christian responses to AIDS was given by UNAIDS’s Deputy Executive Director, Ms Jan Beagle who cautioned for faith groups to stay engaged.

“You are the advocates and practitioners. You have the networks on the ground and you can energise social movements... the poor still die while the rich live. Global AIDS is at tipping point. Although we have seen a 17% drop in AIDS infections worldwide we still reach only a fraction of those infected. For every one treated a further 5 are infected and still, 5,500 people die of AIDS each day.” The real barriers, she said, are not technical or medical but political and cultural. “We need political courage to break the trajectory of AIDS.” she concluded.

Read the full post at www.chaa.info

‘Back the banker’s tax’: International Aids Conference | The Robin Hood Tax

‘Back the banker’s tax’: International Aids Conference | The Robin Hood Tax

With reference to our earlier post about the Financial Transaction Tax campaign At the World AIDS Conference on 23 July 2010 the UN Special Envoy for Innovative Finance called on world leaders to ‘back the banker’s tax’ – referring to the IMF’s recommendation to create new taxes on banks – and to ‘fill the gap ‘, referring to the 70% gap in people accessing lifesaving HIV antiretroviral medicines.

Given the scale of the funding gap, and the scale by which several European nations and the USA bailed out banks during the crisis of 2008, it would seem both an effective and just measure. However, there seems to be a reluctance in several major powers to move forward on this issue, so now is a good time to engage with the Robin Hood Tax campaign where you live and change the minds of governments the world over.

HIV Initiative at ICMDA World Congress

This July the ICMDA HIV Initiative had the privilege to present a seminar at the ICMDA World Congress in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Winners of the 2006 and 2009 ‘Dignity and Right to Health Awards’ Drs Biangtung Langkham & Stephen Waititi. Both spoke eloquently of their long experiences in tackling HIV in (respectively) India and Uganda.

The issue of harm minimisation as opposed to harm elimination was discussed at some length – in particular the issue of whether Christian organisations should be involved in distributing condoms to commercial sex workers – on the one hand this seems to condone behaviour that is not just dangerous but morally wrong, but on the other hand, as we know that they will be plying their trade whatever we say, we should at least seek to minimise their risks, and in so doing earn their trust and the right to help them find other ways of earning a living. The issue extends to clean needle exchanges for IV drug users, and working with other individuals and groups who engage in high risk behaviours.

We hope to bring further news and reports from the World AIDS Conference and other international news in the coming months