Western Asia

Article 123 of the Criminal Code criminalises both HIV exposure and transmission  (relevant sections of the law can be found at the Global Criminalisation Scan). HIV exposure is punished with up to two years' correctional labour, up to two months' arrest or up to a year in prison. "Willfully or self-confidently" transmitting HIV is punished with up to five years' imprisonment. This increases to up to eight years if a pregnant woman or a child are infected, or if more than two individuals are infected. There are no reports of prosecutions.

Azerbaijan enacted HIV-specific laws criminalising both HIV exposure and transmission in 1999. Sentences range from up to two years of “corrective work” to eight years' imprisonment. The first prosecution took place in 2001 and there have been at least four others since then. The most recent, in 2008, involved an 18-year-old female sex worker. UNICEF publicly expressed concern about the young woman being treated as a perpetrator, rather than as a person who had been sexually exploited.

Turkey has prosecuted at least one person for HIV transmission, in 2004, under general laws, specifically for “an act of injury”. The defendant was found guilty of infecting his wife with HIV, and was sentenced to eight years in prison. The verdict was referred for appeal to the Supreme Court, which confirmed that existing personal injury law could be used to prosecute cases of reckless or intentional HIV transmission. The case was originally tried as an “act of murder”, and it is not clear whether the prosecution was based solely on the man not disclosing his status, or whether there was evidence that he intended to harm his wife.