Civil society
organisations (CSOs) providing HIV services and advocacy to key populations and people
living with HIV are increasingly under attack from populist and repressive government
regimes across the world, delegates to the 22nd International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2018) in Amsterdam heard on
Wednesday.
Speakers from
Hungary, Russia, Venezuela, Kenya and the Philippines outlined ways in which
they were facing not just financial cutbacks but government interference in
their attempts to tackle HIV and support men who have sex with men (MSM), people who use drugs, sex workers and other
vulnerable populations. Their stories, while both alarming and concerning, also
gave suggestions for how CSOs might manage such situations and maintain their
presence.
Peter Sarosi of
Rights Reporter Foundation, Hungary, spoke of the rapid reductions
in civil liberties under the Orbán regime in Hungary. Both there and in Russia
and Kenya, CSOs receiving external donor funding are required to register as 'foreign agents', which carries a social stigma and discourages others from
collaborating with them. Currently nine Hungarian CSOs are challenging this at
the European Court of Human Rights.
The Hungarian
drugs strategy no longer supports harm reduction and the two main needle
exchanges in Budapest have been forced to close, reducing injecting equipment
access by 55%. Helping migrants and refugees is now criminalised, despite there
not being particularly large numbers of migrants.
In response,
agencies affected have increased internal collaboration and social media
engagement to get their case across. They had found human stories of people
affected by the changes particularly effective in countering government
propaganda.
Ivan Varentsov
of the Eurasian Harm
Reduction Association outlined
the Russian experience in recent years. He noted that the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) region is the
only one where the epidemic is still growing, and that UNAIDS figures show Russia accounts for 81%
of all new infections there. Approximately 70% of these are amongst people
who use drugs and treatment coverage is only 35%. There is no government
support for any form of harm reduction.
Russia's
foreign agent law was enacted in 2012 and requires listed organisations to
label all publications as from foreign agents. Since 2016 ten non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in HIV prevention listed as foreign agents, mainly for advocating opioid substitution
therapy which is against national policy. Like Hungary, they are challenging
this at the European Court of Human Rights although Russia now threatens to
withdraw from it.
Another difficulty
he cited was the sense that registered NGOs were constantly under threat of
being fined for minor infractions. “The law is like a hammer hanging over you
and you never know when it will fall on you” he said.
Alberto Nieves
of Acción Ciudadana Contra el
SIDA described a rather
different situation in Venezuela, where the country is facing a complex
emergency of political and economic origin. It has gone from having the best
HIV treatment programme in Latin America to having none, leaving people with
HIV at risk of death. The executive branch of government has effectively taken
over from the elected politicians; wages could not meet inflation, crime is
high and the health system is in chaos. The National Guard have broken up
demonstrations by people with chronic diseases. Many people with HIV have left
the country and it is a humanitarian crisis in progress.
Jonas Bagas of
APCASO described yet another crisis, in the Philippines since the advent of the
Duterte government and a declaration of a war on drugs. Official figures show
that 4251 people have been killed in official encounters with police while a
further 16,355 killings associated with drugs are being investigated. The Chair
of the Commission on Human Rights has been jailed and the Chief Justice
dismissed, while attacks on journalists, priests and local government officials
were common.
The Philippines
faces an exploding HIV epidemic with 79% of all cases reported since 2013;
however, almost 80% of these are amongst MSM and only 4% amongst people using
drugs. Nevertheless, government funding is directed at the “war on drugs” which
has become a key plank of the President's consolidation of power.
NGOs working
with both people who use drugs and people living with HIV are responding by documenting human
rights violations while trying to maintain harm reduction services. They have
sympathetic lawyers working with the legal community to sensitise them to the
issues.
Saoyo Tabitha
Griffith, a lawyer, described a situation in Kenya which had echoes of the stories
from Eastern and Central Europe. Like those examples, Kenyan CSOs cannot
operate unless they are registered and since 2014 some 510 have been
deregistered with a further 957 threatened. The explanations given have cited
terrorism, tax evasion or misappropriation of funds but this has included some
of the key HIV and human rights groups.
Some groups
have fought their deregistration, she said, but “you end up spending more time
fighting deregulation than doing the job you're meant to do”. Organisations face
raids, often linked to their work at sensitive times, such as an election
monitoring group which was raided shortly after drawing attention to
irregularities in the general election.
Others,
particularly LGBT organisations, have been refused registration at
all and have had to take to the courts to invoke the Constitution which allows
freedom of association. The government has also tried unsuccessfully to take
control of all external donor funding through a central agency which they would
control, and to further restrict foreign funding.
To defend
Kenyan CSOs, international scrutiny had been helpful, particularly from the UN.
Key actions to defend organisational existence were described as:
- Comply with tax and other regulations
fully at all times
- Litigate to gain constitutional rights
- Use the media to highlight punitive or
arbitrary actions
- Get donors to set aside an “emergency
fund” for when organisations are deregistered and unable to continue services.
In closing,
Shaun Mellors of International HIV/AIDS Alliance pointed out that the
President of the United States, the proposed venue of the 2020 International
AIDS Conference, is a friend and admirer of at least two of the rulers of the
countries represented in the session, Putin and Duterte. He asked the
conference organisers to consider what message that sent to community
delegates.