On 17 February 2011, Denmark’s Minister of Justice announced the suspension of Article 252 of the Danish Criminal Code. This law is reportedly the only HIV-specific criminal law provision in Western Europe and has been used to prosecute some 18 individuals.
Denmark: Justice Minister suspends HIV-specific criminal law, sets up working group
Denmark’s Justice Minister Lars Barfoed has today suspended Article 252 of the Criminal Code – the so-called ‘HIV law’ – pending an inquiry by a government working group to consider whether the only HIV-specific law in Western Europe should be revised or abolished.
The move was announced today in a press release by AIDS-Fondet (AIDS Foundation) and covered in the gay magazine, Out and About. (Both of these are in Danish, and so I’m relying primarily on Google Translate, although colleagues in Denmark have also been in touch to tell me the exciting news.)
Denmark prosecuted its first case in 1993, but the Supreme Court found in 1994 that the wording of the existing law (“wantonly or recklessly endangering life or physical ability”) did not provide a clear legal base for conviction. The phrase “fatal and incurable disease” was added in 1994, and HIV was specified in 2001.
According GNP+’s Global Criminalisation Scan here have been at least 18 prosecutions: at least one failed due to the accused committing suicide. At least ten involved non-Danish nationals, including seven people of African origin. At least eleven convictions for either sexual HIV exposure or transmission are reported. The maximum prison sentence is eight years.
Today’s announcement came about as a result of a Parliamentary question from opposition Unity MP, Per Clausen on behalf of the Parliamentary Legal Committee.
“The Minister should state whether the Ministry [of Justice] will consider changing or eliminating the special clause in the legislation that criminalises [HIV-positive individuals for] unprotected sex with uninfected [individuals] in light of the significantly improved treatment options for HIV-positive people, in particular since treatment is able to reduce the risk of infection to [near] zero.”
In his reply, Justice Minister Lars Barfoed explains the history of the legislation and then quotes the Health Protection Agency about HIV ‘risk’ and ‘harm’.
“Modern combination therapy reduces HIV in the blood by more than 99% during the first weeks of treatment, whereby patients’ general condition improves. The strongly reduced amount of HIV in blood and tissue fluids also greatly reduces the risk of transmission from an HIV-positive person on antiviral therapy. This greatly reduced risk is difficult to quantify but considering the risk to be near zero is a theory that some doctors have put forward, but there is no national or international consensus that about this…The life-expectancy of someone with HIV is no different from the age- and gender-matched background population. HIV is, in other words, not in itself fatal if treated in time; medication taken regularly; and there are otherwise no complications from other diseases, etc. Timely treatment is now so effective and well tolerated, that 85-90% of patients can live normal lives if they take their medication daily. It is the 5-10% of patients who are diagnosed late who still experience a substantial excess mortality and morbidity. [However] HIV is still incurable.”
He goes on to say that the law as it is currently written – casting HIV as a life-threatening condition and criminalising unprotected sex by a person with HIV – appears to be obsolete and that the working group must consider whether to amend, or totally rewrite, Article 252.
The working group will comprise Justice Minister Barfoed and Interior Affairs and Health Minister Bertel Haarder with representatives from the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Health, the Health Protection Agency and the Prosecutor General. It is believed they will come to a conclusion later this year. (Update Feb 22: My contact at AIDS-Fondet tells me this process will take place much sooner, within the next two months.)
In their press release AIDS-Fondet notes that it has been working on changing the law for years and so this development is very welcome.
We hope this suspension is the beginning of the end of the so-called HIV Criminal Law. This criminal provision is in itself a barrier to prevention, and there has also long been a need for the improved treatment of HIV-people to be reflected in the Penal Code, says Henriette Laursen, AIDS-Fondet’s director.
Two of Denmark’s foremost HIV experts, Professor Jens Lundgren and Professor Jens Skinhøj, have previously called for the law’s abolition.
UK: New book explores criminal HIV transmission
An excellent new book on the criminalisation of HIV transmission by Dr Matthew Weait, senior lecturer in law and legal studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, has recently been published.
The book, Intimacy and Responsibility: The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission,
My story on the book and its launch from aidsmap.com follows comments from Dr Catherine Dodds, a research fellow at Sigma research, University of Portsmouth, who has studied the impact of criminal prosecutions in affected communities, I’m including them here.
In her brief talk, Dr Dodds provided an incisive overview of not just the book, but also Dr Weait’s immeasurable contributions to the debate on the criminalisation of HIV transmission over the past decade:
When criminal prosecutions became a reality in England and Wales Matthew encouraged the development of a network of activists,academics, HIV service providers, doctors, politicians, lawyers, civil servants, researchers and journalists and anyone who was interested, frankly… who might be able to collate their knowledge and their talents and their energy to act in whatever way was possible to challenge, clarify and respond to the developments.
As a part of developing this network, he raised the funds from the Economic and Social Research Council to host a series of seminars at Keele University in Stoke and at Birkbeck College here in London. People attending those seminars exchanged knowledge and experiences. They offered a space where people were encouraged to think out loud.
What abides with me from attending those seminars is the way that those attending simply shared their humanity – in all of its strength and frailty and warmth – and that had a great amount to do with the kind of environment that Matthew created. It was an opportunity for learning and planning and thinking and sharing unlike any I have ever known.
Whether it is setting up message-boards so that people can share information and thoughts instantly – or making the time to speak with (and listen to) groups of people with diagnosed HIV, or with groups of medical or legal professionals – what Matthew has always wanted to do is to get people talking about criminal prosecutions for the transmission of HIV. Because he learned, and he taught me to see, that once people chew it over and consider it for a while – the obviousness of applying the criminal law to such situations, tends to grow a little less obvious.
In writing Intimacy and Responsibility, Matthew has effectively thrown that discussion open to a much broader audience. I can tell you from personal experience, that if you want to get noticed – sit on the tube and read this book. Never have I been so aware of so many people being so aware of what it is I am reading. Perhaps they are intrigued by its cover, and on a number of occasions, I have noticed continued glances and thoughtful expressions that indicates they are thinking and wondering about what such a book on such a topic might hold between its covers.
What Matthew does in Intimacy and Responsibility is to pull together and present information from a huge array of different academic disciplines because these are all required in order to begin untangling the complexities of such prosecutions. While a different writer may have tried to dissect this application of the law at the expense of considering what it is to be one of the people involved in such cases, it is from the standpoint of those very people – both complainant and defendant – that Matthew’s main argument begins.
He effectively opens a window into the lived experience of the trial, by closely analysing the transcript of an early prosecution for reckless sexual transmission of HIV. It is here that he begins to forensically dig into the reality of a criminal judicial process that fails to make sense of what it is to be human. He muses that in the criminal justice system’s pursuit of ensuring that blame is laid – the system has perhaps lost sight of what it is to make human society better – by losing sight of (or perhaps not even considering) what is required to reduce HIV transmission in the midst of this epidemic.
This isn’t an easy discussion to initiate, by any means. Matthew is quite frank in the pages of his book that he knows that the odds stack up against his position, and that many people will have a gut instinct about the morality and the criminality of such situations. But despite the uncomfortableness that it might cause, he argues that slowing the HIV epidemic requires us to prioritise the public good. This in no way diminishes Matthew’s recognition of the pain, the hurt, the fear and the distrust that is likely to be a part of the experience of both complainants
and defendants involved in such cases.
In extending this debate, Matthew’s book asks us to consider what our own priorities are. It asks us to engage actively as citizens who think about how our criminal justice system works, and who ask if it should be the place to resolve all of the issues in our complicated, intimate, messy, sloppy, passionate, tangled, painful human lives. As he says, and I paraphrase here a bit: ‘The fact that we inhabit a society… in which an ever more extensive and punitive system of criminal law is understood as the mechanism that can provide the solution, does not mean that we should allow our imaginations to rot’.
The extent to which Matthew has extended his leadership, and energy and intellectual capacity and humanity to challenging and responding to this application of the criminal law cannot be overstated. This book incorporates and reflects that wider project and it will prove to be a tremendous resource for many years to come.
Decriminalise reckless HIV transmission, argues HIV legal expert
A new book on the criminalisation of HIV transmission by Dr Matthew Weait, senior lecturer in law and legal studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, argues that current English law has “the potential to do more harm than good” if “its primary purpose is to prevent onward transmission.”
The book, Intimacy and Responsibility: The criminalisation of HIV transmission, was welcomed by HIV clinicians and advocates at last week’s central London launch, which highlighted the impact of criminal prosecutions on the ability of doctors and researchers to work effectively.
Dr Jane Anderson, consultant physician at Homerton Hospital, and lead author of the British HIV Association’s (BHIVA) briefing paper on HIV transmission, the law and the work of the clinical team said that the spectre of criminal prosecutions had affected the way the NHS provided services to HIV-positive patients “in terms of care, advice and confidentiality” and had created “a great deal of anxiety and concern.”
She said that many healthcare staff working with HIV-positive patients felt that “the law was looking over people’s shoulders” and that it had significantly affected the doctor-patient relationship since doctors could potentially be asked to testify as expert witnesses for either prosecution or defence.
Dr Anderson also highlighted the impact recent prosecutions have had on research. “The rigour of our research has been coloured by prosecutions,” she said. “We have had to reconsider whether we ask certain questions whilst researching sexual behaviour in the current climate.”
Also speaking at the launch was Dr Catherine Dodds, a research fellow at Sigma research, University of Portsmouth, who has studied the impact of criminal prosecutions in affected communities. She said that in his book, Dr Weait “asks us to engage actively as citizens who think about how our criminal justice system works, and who ask if it should be the place to resolve all of the issues in our complicated, intimate, messy, sloppy, passionate, tangled, painful human lives.”
Dr Weait’s book critically examines and deconstructs the English criminal law’s approach to criminal prosecutions for reckless HIV transmission. In one of the book’s most revelatory chapters, he uses transcripts from the trial of Feston Konzani to show how the English criminal law reduces complex human thoughts, feelings and interactions to “over-simplified accounts of responsibility and irresponsibility, of guilt and innocence.”
The book also examines concepts of harm, risk, recklessness, consent, and responsibility and strongly suggests that the criminal law is ill-equipped to understand these concepts pragmatically. If the primary purpose of the criminal law is to prevent onward transmission, he argues, then it “has the potential to do more harm than good.”
Edwin Cameron, Justice of the South African Supreme Court of Appeal, and one of the world’s leading figures on HIV and AIDS and the law, writes in the book’s preface that “Weait’s premise is that criminal law and criminal justice should be used for the public good rather than as means of securing reparation for particular individuals.”
“If his argument is correct,” he continues, “then we must question criminal laws that may discourage people from HIV testing, or from being candid about their sexual history when confiding in health care workers. We must question whether it is good to impose criminal liability when media coverage is often sensational and inaccurate – with the effect of demonising all with HIV, and marking them as potential aggressors. We must question whether such laws acknowledge the difficulties that some living with HIV – particularly women, who may risk violence and expulsion from the home – have in negotiating safer sex.”
“And we must question the public ‘good’ that comes from ascribing sole responsibility for transmission (as such laws do) to the person with HIV, thus attenuating the partner’s responsibility for avoiding transmission – especially in an epidemic when all should be aware of the risks of unprotected sex,” writes Mr Justice Cameron.
The best way to promote “a more authentic and socially beneficial approach to the meaning, practice and expression of responsibility than that which the law constructs and reinforces,” concludes Dr Weait “is to decriminalise the reckless transmission of HIV.”
Reference
Weait M. Intimacy and Responsibility: The criminalisation of HIV transmission ISBN 978-1-904385-70-7; Routledge-Cavendish, 2007.
Is having HIV ‘like a death sentence’?
This is an amended version of a blog entry originally entitled ‘Canada: Expert doctor defends his statements on HIV life expectancy’. I was forced to remove the original posting to which this entry refers due to a threat of legal action.
I have now included the news article from the original posting (about the Owen Antoine case in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada) in this fuller entry on Mr Antoine’s trial.
The offending post dealt with the reported statements of Dr Anurag Markanday, the expert witness for the Crown in an article on the case from the St Thomas Times Journal, with which I strongly disagree.
Dr Anurag Markanday told the jury there’s no cure for HIV, but drugs do slow the process of the disease. “It’s like a death sentence … while we can keep the virus suppressed, we are going to run out of options.” Once diagnosed, the average lifespan of a person is eight to 10 years, he testified.
For someone with access to HIV treatment – as is the case in Canada – HIV is now a chronic, manageable condition.
In subsequent email correspondence, Dr Markanday again asserted his opinion that, “in the absence of a cure, I would still label it as “death sentence” for someone not on therapy (when clinically indicted) [sic] or in heavily treatment experienced patients with multiple drug mutations and limited options.”
Of course if someone is not on treatment when they should be (in most cases when they have a CD4 count below 350 cells/mm3) then they are more likely to get sick and die. But that is focusing on the exception and not the rule.
And yes, if someone was diagnosed in the 80s or 90s and burned through every class of drug they may well have multiple drug mutations, but there are now many options for what used to be known as ‘salvage therapy’, including the amazing new drugs and new drug classes that Dr Markanday says he is working with.
Consequently, I really must question his focus on worse-case scenarios and his use of the emotive phrase, ‘death sentence’.
Dr Markanday then points out “the effects from other co-morbidities such as hepatitis co-infection with early cirrhosis and mortality, hyperlipidemia/CV events have also increased. (In terms of number of years one could safely say at least ten years since the diagnosis).”
Again, I wonder why Dr Markanday focuses on hepatitis coinfection – which certainly does increase the likelihood of illness and death in someone with HIV? I have no idea whether the complainant was already infected with viral hepatitis before she was allegedly infected with HIV, but if this is not the case, how is it relevant?
As for lipid increase and cardiovascular events, the latest word from the D:A:D study, which looks at these events, is that “there does not seem to be an epidemic on the horizon – simply a risk that needs to be managed.”
So, yes, remaining on suppressive anti-HIV treatment, giving up smoking, exercising and eating well, and taking lipid-lowering drugs if indicated, may be necessary to reduce the risk of an HIV-positive person succumbing to a heart attack, but the increased risk of treated HIV infection itself is not considered something that dramatically alters life-expectancy.
Why could Dr Markanday not have said that with treatment, someone diagnosed with HIV infection today is expected to have, more or less, a normal lifespan? That is what Italy’s Dr Stefano Vella – one of the most respected HIV clinicians in the world – said at the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto, and many expert HIV clinicians agree.
Solid data backs up Dr Vella’s assertion. In 2006, researchers from the United States calculated that someone who was provided with anti-HIV drug combinations according to 2004’s US treatment guidelines would benefit from these treatments for between 21 and 25 years before they finally stopped working. Their estimate included four separate attempts at suppressing HIV to ‘undetectable’ levels, from first-line therapy to ‘salvage’ therapy. (Schackman BR et al. The lifetime cost of current HIV care in the United States. Medical Care 44(11); 990=997, 2006.)
Last year, a large Danish study concluded that a 25 year-old diagnosed with HIV and treated with the anti-HIV drugs available then could expect to live well into their mid-sixties . The Danish study found that the average 25 year-old who remained HIV-negative could expect to live until they were in their mid-seventies. Consequently, successfully treated HIV infection appears to reduce life-expectancy by about ten years. (Lohse N et al. Survival of persons with and without HIV infection in Denmark, 1995-2005. Annals of Internal Medicine:146: 87-95, 2007.)
However, anti-HIV treatments – and knowledge about how to best use them – continue to advance at a rapid pace. As time goes on, experts believe that is very likely that other ways of treating HIV will be discovered that will mean that successful outcomes from the use of anti-HIV treatment could last even longer.
Certainly, HIV can lead to some serious illnesses if untreated. In 2006, around 100 out of the 400 deaths reported in HIV-positive people in the UK were due to their being diagnosed with HIV too late for effective anti-HIV treatment, highlighting the importance of HIV testing in order to make the most of the latest advances in anti-HIV therapy.
Another third of these 400 deaths were not considered related to HIV at all. Consequently, most HIV-related deaths are preventable if HIV is diagnosed early enough and treated succesfully. (Johnson M et al. BHIVA Mortality Audit. BHIVA Autumn Conference, London, 2006.)
Ultimately, anti-HIV treatments have greatly improved the life expectancy of people with HIV, as long as they:
• Know their HIV status early enough to get timely and effective treatment
• Have access to good quality HIV treatment and care
• And take anti-HIV drugs regularly and on time.
Finally, as for life expectancy for someone not on treatment, there are new data from UNAIDS and WHO which finds that, as a result of a better understanding of the natural history of untreated HIV infection, the average number of years that people living with HIV are estimated to survive without treatment has been increased from nine to eleven years.