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"Bad" laws hurt sex workers from Uganda to Nepal, AIDS meeting told

by Katie Nguyen | Katie_Nguyen1 | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Monday, 21 July 2014 10:44 GMT

Sex workers, gay men, prisoners, drug users and transgender people least likely to get HIV help

MELBOURNE (Thomson Reuters Foundation)- After Uganda's president signed into law a bill that punished gay sex with long prison sentences, Daisy Nakato received a visit from the police.

The country's Red Pepper tabloid had outed hundreds of gays after President Yoweri Museveni initialled the anti-homosexuality bill in February and Nakato's name was on the list. Over the following six hours, Nakato, a bisexual sex worker, begged the police not to arrest her.

"I had to stay in hiding for over a week without taking ARV (antiretroviral) medication. A lot of people are going through the same thing. A lot of people have run to neighbouring countries," Nakato told delegates at an AIDS conference in Melbourne on Monday.

One of the major concerns of the gathering of 12,000 AIDS activists, scientists and people living with HIV is how the criminalisation of groups at high risk of HIV - such as gay men, sex workers and transgender people - threatens progress in the global effort to fight AIDS.

In 116 countries prostitution is illegal and in 78 countries same-sex relations are a criminal offence.

According to the World Health Organisation, female sex workers are 14 times more likely to have HIV than other women, gay men are 19 times more likely to have HIV than the general population, and transgender women are almost 50 times more likely than other adults to have HIV.

Yet the same groups are least likely to get HIV prevention, testing and treatment services, WHO says.

'BAD HEALTH POLICY'

It's not only gays and lesbians who feel persecuted in Uganda, Nakato said. Sex workers are among those under pressure from an anti-pornography law, dubbed locally the anti-mini skirt law, which seeks to police erotic behaviour.

"These laws are just there to drive us underground, to harass us," Nakato said at a discussion on the state of legislation in India, Nepal and the United States among others.

India gay rights activist Ashok Kavi described the "incredible sense of despondency" after India's Supreme Court reinstated a ban on gay sex in December, following a four-year period of decriminalisation that had helped bring homosexuality into the open in the socially conservative country.

Manisha Dhakal, a Nepalese transgender activist, said certain laws in Nepal - while not criminalising transgender sex workers - were deliberately used against them.

"When we are walking in the street, people are gathered to see us and there are traffic jams because the taxi drivers also want to see us," Dhakal said, adding that the commotion often ended in arrest under the Public Offences Act.

By contrast, the United States was working on changing laws that criminalise HIV transmission, said Nick Rhoades, an American whose conviction for the criminal transmission of HIV in the state of Iowa was overturned last month by the Supreme Court.

"We know that criminalisation is bad health policy. It is bad public policy. It doesn't work to prevent the spread of disease. In fact, it does just the opposite," the U.S. ambassdor to Australia, John Berry, told the session.

"The global fight against HIV and AIDS will not be won by relegating segments of the population to the shadows."

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