Behind Bars – HIV Prosecution Harm

posted: 09/12/2010

Behind Bars is a collection of interviews exposing how criminal laws on HIV transmission are affecting people’s working and private lives, all around the world.

Personal Prosecution Tales
The personal stories illustrate the dilemmas faced by doctors, lawyers, researchers and advocates. They include the stories of

• a doctor who was forced to aid a police investigation against her ethical principles,
• a woman living with HIV who prosecuted her former partner, and
• a lawyer who advocated in an HIV transmission case.

There is little research showing precisely what effect HIV prosecutions have. But prosecutions further marginalise people already vulnerable to HIV infection, including women, men who have sex with men, sex workers and people who use drugs. Legislation and legal practice is different in every country around the world, and we need to learn more about the effect of using criminal law on HIV in each country. By fuelling stigma, prosecutions undermine the HIV efforts to prevent, treat and care.

World of Prosecutions
From the UK to the USA, Mali to Mozambique, Azerbaijan to Australia, criminal laws are increasingly being used to prosecute HIV transmission or exposure. But, as the interviews reveal, criminal law is a blunt instrument for HIV prevention.

More denial, secrecy and fear
Behind Bars show how a simplistic ‘law-and-order’ response to HIV intensifies a climate of denial, secrecy and fear and provides a fertile breeding ground for the spread of HIV.

Paying the prosecutions price
Prosecuting wilful transmission of HIV is proving a costly intervention - in terms of time and money spent on investigating individuals’ private lives and determining the burden of proof – and seems to have had limited impact on HIV prevention.
 

Contributor Jan Albert, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the Karolinska Institute Sweden, says:
“Since I’ve been an expert witness in court trials, my personal opinion regarding people living with the virus has changed. In my experience the accused are seldom ‘criminals’. There are many reasons for neglecting to inform sexual partners about HIV status, including denial. None, or very few, have had the intent to transmit HIV, which is how these acts often are described by the media. There will be more and more HIV infected people living in Sweden, and the rest of the world. Do we want to turn a proportion of our population into potential criminals every time they have sex?”

Kevin Osborne, Senior HIV Advisor for IPPF, said:
“These stories show that criminalisng the transmission of HIV is actually undermining our efforts to prevent the spread of HIV. Fear of prosecution deters people from coming forward for testing and counselling; policing the bedroom effectively drives the problem underground.”

Video campaign
The Behind Bars videos and interviews can be found at International Planned Parenthood Federation. The short campaign video highlights the impact of prosecutions. The film is available on YouTube and on the IPPF website.

The video is two-minutes long, stylised and artistic, showing the humanness of sex, of relationships and of HIV. The people in the film share their own, diverse stories (they are not professional actors), and many are living with HIV. It builds on the Declaration of Sexual Rights and purposefully focuses on sex – irrespective of how, where, with whom and why people have sex.

HIV Prisoner - Stay in Jail

posted: 24/11/2010

A Coventry man with HIV, tuberculosis and hepatitis pleaded with a judge to free him from jail because he fears for his life.
 

The 37 year old man from Coventry, claimed that he was not receiving the correct HIV treatment, after he was jailed for 20 weeks for refusing to take a breathalyser test.
 

A court heard tests had shown that the viral levels in his blood were increasing. He also claimed that his tuberculosis could harm other inmates.
 

Stay in jail because not proved life in danger

But at Coventry Crown Court Judge Christopher Hodson refused to reduce the length of his prison sentence – because the man’s barrister could not prove that his life was in danger.
 

In August the man was parked in a bus lane with hazard lights on and refused police help, and drove off in “an erratic manner”. He was stopped and taken to a nearby police station where he refused to take a breathalyser test.
 

On November 11, at Coventry Magistrates he was jailed for 20 weeks and banned from driving for five years. It was the third time he had been charged with refusing to provide a sample.
 

Defence barrister Ben Close said: “He had drank two or three pints which had reacted badly with HIV medication he was taking. He has now been in custody for eight days – he has not seen his daughter and he feels that he is not receiving proper medication. He realises his health is worsening through hot flushes. He has also raised concern about infecting other inmates with tuberculosis. He describes the pain as coming and going.”
 

Judge Hodson declined to reduce the sentence after a short hearing, but did reduce the length of his driving ban to three years.
 

Judge needs medical evidence

The judge said “If his life was in danger then there needs to be evidence and I need to see it,” Judge Hodson said. The judge agreed the magistrates should have ordered a medical report before sentencing, but said that he believed that magistrates had got it “spot on”.
 

Judge Hodson added: “If magistrates had heard that he was HIV positive and he wasn’t receiving the correct cocktail of drugs then the sentence may have been suspended. But we believe that the prison service must have the facilities to deal with any prisoner, even if he has HIV.”

The problems of HIV in jails

If the judge read the HIV in prisons feature in the latest issue (November 2010) of HIV Treatment Update, he’d know that treatment is not always so simple in prison and HIV is a real problem for UK prisons. 
 

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