Kenya: High Court declares Section 24 of HIV and AIDS Prevention and Control Act (2006) unconstitutional, removes overly broad and vague HIV-specific criminal statute

By Kamau Muthoni Kenya: The High Court has declared unconstitutional a section of the HIV and Aids Prevention and Control Act that sought to criminalise reckless spreading of the disease. A three-judge bench comprising justices Mumbi Ngugi, Isaac Lenaola and George Odunga ruled Section 24, introduced by the State and criminalising the reckless spreading of HIV, was unclear and had no limits on which group of people was targeted.

“We so hold that Section 24 of the HIV and Aids Prevention and Control Act No. 14 of 2006 does not meet the principle of legality which is a component of the rule of law. The said section is vague and over-broad, and lacks certainty, especially with respect to the term ‘sexual contact’,” read part of the judgment.
As drafted, the section provided that a person who is aware of being infected with HIV or who is carrying and is aware of carrying HIV shall not, knowingly and recklessly, place another person at risk of becoming infected with HIV unless that other person knows that fact and voluntarily accepts the risk of being infected. Further, the section read that the person shall take all reasonable measures and precautions to prevent the transmission of HIV to others; and inform, in advance, any sexual contact or person with whom needles are shared of that fact, failure to which one would be jailed, if convicted by a court, for a term not exceeding seven years or a fine not exceeding Sh500,000, or both.
Justice Lenaola ruled that the section of law failed to meet the legal requirement that an offence must be clearly defined in law. “To retain that provision in the statute books would lead to an undesirable situation of the retention of legislation that provides for vague criminal offences which leave it to the court’s subjective assessment whether a defendant is to be convicted or acquitted,” said the judge.
In the case, filed by a lobby group called Aids Law Project, the court heard that the same section had warranted other people surrounding an infected person to seek his or her status from a medical practitioner without their discretion or involvement. The lobby group argued that such risk of unwarranted disclosure of confidential information was against the affected person’s privacy. Aids Law Project adopted the view that Section 24 of the Act was likely to promote fear and stigma as it imposed a stereotype that people living with HIV were immoral and dangerous criminals, and this would negate the efforts being made to encourage people to live openly about their HIV status.

China: Warranted fears of stigma and discrimination in healthcare settings resulting in people with HIV not disclosing their status

“I was so desperate, and I could not imagine the future if I was really infected,” Fu Yi (pseudonym), a maternity doctor at Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital in Chengdu, recalled her feelings when she was exposed to HIV-infected blood during a birth in 2010.

Fu accidentally exposed her injured foot to the blood of the HIV-positive patient who was delivering a baby – Fu did not know the patient was HIV-positive, until the blood test results came out the next day.

Fu immediately started to take anti-AIDS emergency prevention pills. She suffered from the  side effects, vomit and nausea, for a month, and lived in an abyss of fear for over half a year until she was eventually declared HIV free, she told the Global Times.

This incident was made public recently when the media began to report on the danger of exposure to infectious diseases that medical professionals face.

“We call [what Fu experienced] ‘occupational exposure,'” Xiang Qian, with the healthcare associated-infections division at Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, told the Global Times.

Occupational exposure for medical staff can be defined as coming into contact with infectious virus or toxic substances at work, which can pose health risks, according to Xiang.

Fu was not the only medical worker who has been exposed to infectious diseases at work. As of press time, there are no national statistics available, but in the hospital where Fu works a total of 122 medical staff reported being exposed to infectious diseases in 2013, including AIDS, hepatitis B and syphilis, according to Xiang.

From January to November this year, 88 medical workers, 43 percent of them nurses and 29 percent of them doctors, were exposed to infectious diseases at work. Hepatitis B topped the list, with 45 percent of the incidents of exposure involving the disease, followed by syphilis with 14 percent and HIV with 7 percent.

Among those infectious diseases that medical staff are exposed to, HIV is the most serious.

The risk is heightened as many patients do not disclose their HIV infection to physicians when being treated for other conditions. Meanwhile, many physicians do not take the kinds of precautions necessary to avoid becoming infected.

Concealment

Pregnant women usually go through a full blood test for possible infectious diseases before the delivery, and the result comes the day of the birth.

But in Fu’s case, the patient’s critical condition meant that she had to perform the delivery immediately, Fu said.

The patient’s family concealed her medical history and told Fu the patient had no infections. Fu, who had no time to take extra precautions, went into the operating room with an injured foot.

“From the doctor’s perspective, concealing infectious diseases is unfair,” Fu said.

But in some HIV patients’ eyes, disclosing their disease would jeopardize their access to healthcare as some hospitals may transfer them to designated infectious disease hospitals that offer inferior treatment.

Bi De, (pseudonym), 26, an AIDS patient who organized a debate in Shenzhen in November on whether HIV carriers should disclose their disease to doctors not treating their HIV, said he understood the ethical necessity to disclose one’s infections.

“But after my experience, I would not tell them [doctors] again,” Bi said. He first learnt he was HIV positive was two years ago when he went to a hospital in Henan Province to receive treatment for facial paralysis, and the hospital told him about his disease and transferred him to a designated hospital in Zhengzhou.

“But the infectious disease hospital did not have enough resources, and I finally recovered [from his paralysis]after visiting a Traditional Chinese Medicine doctor,” Bi said.

In another high-profile case that came to light last year, an HIV-positive cancer patient sued a Tianjin hospital that refused to treat his cancer due to his HIV. The case was the first well-known case of an HIV carrier suing a hospital for discrimination.

After hearing of the case, then vice-premier Li Keqiang [now premier] immediately called for better treatment of HIV/AIDS patients.

But the Tianjin Hexi District Court last week rejected the case as the plaintiff failed to provide a legal basis for his claims, according to Beijing-based newspaper The Mirror.

Chinese media has reported many cases of hospitals delaying or refusing treatment to HIV carriers despite the regulation issued by the State Council in 2006 which stipulates that clinics and hospitals should not refuse or delay treatment for HIV/AIDS patients.

According to Xiang, hospitals should only transfer patients to designated infectious disease hospitals when their conditions could pose public health risks, such as if they have SARS or bird flu.

Shao Yiming, an AIDS expert at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Global Times that hospitals are obliged to treat the diseases of HIV carriers.

“The HIV virus has a lower transmission level than many other infectious diseases such as hepatitis B. Why can they [doctors] treat [the disease] of hepatitis B carriers but not those of HIV carriers?” Shao said.

By the end of 2013, the number of people infected with HIV/AIDS hit 810,000 in China, according to the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention.

Shao suggested the country should put the related laws into practice while making more effort to promote knowledge of HIV/AIDS among medical staff and society.

Safety protection awareness

Xiang’s hospital laid out protection guidelines for medical staff to minimize their exposure to infectious diseases, but many are reluctant to adopt them.

“For example, some doctors following extra safety protection guidelines have to wear two sets of gloves, which they believe affect their surgical performance,” Xiang said.

Who should pay for the safety protection equipment in a long run is another headache for Xiang.

As the government subsidy does not cover it, hospitals that make an insufficient profit find it difficult to afford the equipment, he said.

“Some hospitals would not even pay for their medical workers to have a hepatitis B vaccine,” He said.

But Fu, who has performed gynecological surgeries on two HIV carriers after she was exposed, has been extra careful since the exposure.

“I wear special masks to prevent the blood splashing, safety protection suits, shoes and other extra safety protection equipment when I perform surgeries,” she said.

South Africa: Forced or involuntary disclosure in healthcare settings disproportionately affecting women resulting in discrimination and gender-based violence, despite constitutional protections

Editor’s note: This story is part of a Special Report produced by The GroundTruth Project called “Laws of Men: Legal systems that fail women.” It is produced with support from the Ford Foundation. Reported by Tracy Jarrett and Emily Judem.

An HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, thanks to advances in medicine and treatment in the last 30 years. But stigma against HIV/AIDS and fear of discrimination still run strong in South Africa, despite legal protections, as well as drastically improved treatment, prevention techniques and education. Today an estimated 19 percent of South African adults ages 15-49 are living with HIV.

And women, who represent about 60 percent of people living with HIV in South Africa, face a disproportionately large array of consequences, including physical violence and abuse.

“Upon disclosure of women’s HIV positive status,” reads a 2012 study by the AIDS Legal Network on gender violence and HIV, “women’s lives change, due to fear and the continuum of violence and abuse perpetrated against them.”

Although forced or involuntary disclosure of one’s HIV status — along with any discrimination that may result from that disclosure — was made illegal by South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution, experts and advocates say that public knowledge of these laws is limited and the legal system is not equipped to implement them.

Not only are women disproportionately affected by HIV, but they are also more likely to know their status. More women get tested, said Rukia Cornelius, community education and mobilization manager at the NGO Sonke Gender Justice, based in Johannesburg and Cape Town, because unlike men, women need antenatal care.

And often, she said, clinics give women HIV tests when they come in for prenatal visits.

The way hospitals and clinics are set up also are not always conducive to protecting privacy, said Alexandra Muller, researcher at the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town.

“People who provide services in the public system, at the community level, are community members,” said Muller. “This is an important dynamic when we think about stigma and disclosure.”

Doctors and nurses can see 60 to 80 patients per day in an overcrowded facility with shared consultation rooms, Muller said.

“There’s not a lot of consideration for how is a clinic set up,” added Cornelius, so that “a health care worker who has done your test and knows your status doesn’t shout across the room to the other health care worker, ‘okay, this one’s HIV-positive, that file goes over there.’”

Once HIV-positive women disclose their status, willingly or not,they are disproportionately affected by stigma because of the direct link between HIV and gender violence.

 

Media Stigma, HIV And Criminalization for AIDS 2012 (Leo Herrera, Sero Project, US, 2012)

SERO Project, Media Stigma, HIV And Criminalization for International AIDS Conference, Washington DC, July 2012.

Presentation by Sean Strub, Film by Leo Herrera.