Ugandan nurse Rosemary Namubiru spent 10 months in jail for
accidentally pricking herself with a needle while treating a patient in 2014. For that, she was called a "killer nurse" in the
courts and tried for attempted murder. That's because Namubiru is HIV-positive. The child she was
treating tested negative for HIV. Activist Paula Donovan of advocacy group AIDS-Free World
said Namubiru is one of many HIV-positive people who have been unfairly
prosecuted.
"This happens frequently with cases of criminalization
of HIV — that with no transmission whatsoever, and even when there's no
possibility of transmission, they are still being brought up in front of courts
and charged with heinous crimes," she said on the sidelines of the
International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa.
No known law makes it illegal to have HIV, but human rights
lawyers say people with the virus are often treated as criminals. Seventy-two
nations have laws that specifically apply to people with HIV, most of them
concerning disclosure. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported
last year that 24 U.S. states require people who know they are HIV-positive to
disclose their status to sexual partners, and that 25 states criminalize
actions that have little chance of spreading the virus.
'They stigmatize people'
"All those laws are quite problematic, in terms of the
fact that they stigmatize people who are living HIV, they put unnecessary
burdens on people living with HIV," said Nairobi-based human rights lawyer
Allan Maleche, who sat in a small, private booth with other lawyers at the
International AIDS Conference and dispensed free legal advice to all comers.
Off the top of his head, Maleche rattled off a number of
current cases. He's fighting a request from the president of Kenya for a public
list of all children living with HIV, which lawyers argue is a gross privacy
violation. He's represented numerous tuberculosis patients who have been jailed
for not taking their medication.
"And my worst horror story — I have an ongoing case
before the high court of Kenya — is doctors carrying out tubal ligation of
women who are living with HIV, without their consent," he said. The idea
seems to be that women who could get pregnant would put their lives at risk
because their immune system will be suppressed, he said. He called the practice
another "gross violation of human rights."Donovan said the laws themselves don't need to change.
Instead, she said, everyone, regardless of HIV status, should be treated
equally under the law.
“The essential thing that needs to be remembered, though, is
that we have criminal codes, and that if every citizen in a particular country
is held to the same standard, then that’s the way the rule of law should
apply,” she said
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