The criminalisation of HIV transmission or exposure has been a recurrent topics of the XVII International AIDS Conference with five major sessions and at least 20 different oral or poster presentations.

“Criminal HIV transmission and exposure laws spreading around the world ‘like a virus’” write Edwin J. Bernard at Aidsmap where he also reports on Justice Cameron’s plenary presentation about HIV criminalisation arround the world.

In his presentation, Judge Cameroon gives ten reasons why criminal prosecutions are bad policy:

1. Criminalisation is ineffective.
2. Criminal laws and criminal prosecutions are a poor substitutes for measures that really protect those at risk.
3. Criminalisation victimises, oppresses and endangers women.
4. Criminalisation is often unfairly and selectively enforced.
5. Criminalisation places blame on one person instead of responsibility on two.
6. Criminalisation laws are difficult and degrading to apply.
7. Many HIV-specific laws are extremely poorly drafted.
8. HIV criminalisation increases stigma.
9. Criminalisation is a blatant disincentive to testing.
10. Criminalisation assumes the worst about people with HIV, and punishes their vulnerability.

In a commentary published in JAMA, Judge Cameron concluded that “In the overwhelming majority of cases, HIV is not spread by criminals but by consensual participants in a sexual act, neither of whom know their HIV status: individuals, in short, acting in ways that most would recognize as ordinary. We believe that within the constraints imposed by their knowledge, resources, and environment, most people do their best to protect themselves and others. Society’s obligation is not to condemn, but to create conditions in which safe behavioral choices become rational and desirable. The blunt use of HIV-specific criminal statutes and prosecutions does the opposite.”

At least a dozen African countries have already adopted laws that criminalise the transmission of HIV. Often it is done with the support of American-funded organisations. But the attempt at criminalising HIV transmission is neither new nor limited to Africa. In France, back in 2005, the women of France’s Femmes Positives wanted the right to put their infectors behind bars. “Femmes Positives champions women who allege that they were infected by men who knowingly withheld or lied about their HIV status” reports POZ.

Judge Cameron has a long way to go before governments recognise that criminalising HIV will not protect their people from getting infected.

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