AIDS Fight Targets Laws Against Homosexuality, UN’s Sidibe Says

By Bill Varner

March 16 (Bloomberg) -- The battle against AIDS will include a push to overturn laws that criminalize homosexuality in 85 nations, said the head of the coalition of United Nations agencies formed to fight the disease.

Michel Sidibe of Mali, the executive director of UNAIDS, said transmission of the HIV virus that causes AIDS can be up to 10 times greater in countries with repressive laws against homosexuality compared to more open societies. Laws that criminalize homosexuality make it less likely that gays and lesbians will seek treatment, so fighting AIDS can become a “force for social transformation,” he said.

“We cannot accept the tyranny of the majority,” Sidibe told reporters in New York yesterday. “We must insist that the rights of minorities are upheld. If we don’t, the epidemic will grow again.”

The global economic crisis and “growing conservatism” in some countries have combined to stall movement toward overturning colonial-era laws against homosexuality, Sidibe said. The trend, demonstrated by an anti-homosexuality law being debated in Uganda’s parliament, is “very scary,” he said.

Sidibe said he wants to highlight repression of homosexuals at the international AIDS conference scheduled for Vienna in July. He said Islamic nations and many others among the 192 UN member governments oppose such political and social activism.

Only 66 nations backed a declaration in the UN General Assembly last year urging the decriminalization of homosexuality.

Transition Stage

Sidibe said the fight against AIDS was in a “transition” stage where gains could be reversed. New HIV infections have declined by 17 percent globally during the past eight years, showing efforts to curb the spread of the world’s deadliest infectious disease are working, the UN said in November.

About 2 million people die from AIDS-related causes each year, making it a bigger killer than tuberculosis or malaria, according to World Health Organization figures. About 2.7 million people became infected with the AIDS-causing virus in 2008, compared with 3.2 million in 2001.

The coalition of 10 UN agencies known as UNAIDS also needs to enhance efforts to confront what Sidibe called “complacency” among young people. They haven’t been exposed to as much information as other age groups about AIDS and how it is transmitted, he said.

Sidibe said one result was that the rate of transmission among homosexuals in the U.S. was higher in the 19-to-25 age bracket than the national average.

“We failed somewhere,” he said.

--Editors: Edward DeMarco, Don Frederick

To contact the reporter on this story: Bill Varner at the United Nations at wvarner@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jim Kirk at jkirk12@bloomberg.net