Human Rights Court - HIV discrimination
posted: 18/03/2011
The European Court of Human Rights has just made a helpful and important ruling about HIV discrimination. The court said discrimination against people with HIV is so widespread that it means people with HIV are a “vulnerable group with a history of prejudice and stigmatisation”.
This ruling makes it easier for other people to make HIV discrimination claims on human rights grounds. This means people with HIV will automatically be treated in future human rights cases as 'vulnerable'. This means one less thing to prove when making a human rights claim in UK courts and tribunals.
With cuts to public services for people with HIV, including access to free legal aid, more people with HIV in the UK are likely to need to use the Human Rights Act. This ruling will help.
The European Court case was against Russia. Russia refused a residence permit to a man from Uzbekistan (who is married to a Russian woman with whom he has a child) simply because he is HIV-positive. The Court said this plainly breached their human right to family life. If he hadn’t had HIV he would have been given the residence permit to live with his wife and child in Russia.
The court said, "The mere presence of a HIV-positive individual in a country is not in itself a threat to public health."
Human Right to Family Life and non-discrimination
Russia was found to have broken Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to family life, and Article 14, which bans discrimination.
Last October, the European Human Rights Court ruled against Russia because of Moscow's bans of gay pride events. Then the court found that Russia was breaking the European Convention guarantees of freedom of assembly and association, the right to an effective remedy and prohibition of discrimination.
Source
More details on this New York law professor’s blog
European Court of Human Rights
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