By Beri Hull, Global Advocacy Officer for the International Community of Women Living with HIV/AIDS (ICW Global) and Maeve McKean, ICW’s Women’s Law and Public Policy Legal Fellow. ICW Global is an AIDS 2010 Organizing Partner.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has taken a catastrophic toll on women and girls. Women and girls make up 50 percent of infections globally and constitute nearly 60 percent of those living with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. The International Community of Women Living with HIV and AIDS Global (ICW) is a membership advocacy network of and for HIV-positive women. We advocate for women’s rights and share the concerns of all HIV-positive women, including young women, girls, sex workers, injection drug users, prisoners, migrants and transgender women. 

The Thailand Positive Partnership Program (PPP) is a micro credit program benefiting people living with HIV/AIDS in rural Thailand. UNAIDS/O. O'Hanlon

While we at ICW Global are encouraged by the theme Rights Here, Right Now, we must work over the next days and years to make this theme a reality. This conference is a time to speak openly and to take action for the rights of all HIV-positive women. 

Addressing human rights in the context of HIV means addressing gender inequality and its impact on HIV positive women.
Gender inequality is a driving force in the HIV pandemic. Whether in personal relationships, in the community, within the workforce, or in political circles, gender inequality affects women all over the world. Inequality increase women’s vulnerability to poverty and vice-versa, and both impact harshly on a woman’s ability to enjoy her full range of human rights. In the context of HIV, gender inequality and poverty not only increase the risk of becoming infected, but also leave women more vulnerable than men to its impact.  There is international recognition (starting with the Cairo Declaration) of the need to address gender inequality, which must be a central component to the HIV response.

Addressing human rights in the context of HIV means giving a platform to HIV-positive women, so that they are meaningfully involved in decision-making, policy formation and programme implementation. 
Women who inject drugs must be part of the harm reduction conversation. Harm reduction policies and programmes are typically gender neutral, causing the needs and particular challenges of women who inject drugs to be ignored. Not only do women who inject drugs suffer from the dual stigma of gender discrimination and drug use but, as the Open Society Institute has documented, there is “a higher likelihood that women drug users will provide sex in exchange for housing, sustenance, and protection; suffer violence from sexual partners; and have difficulty insisting that their sexual partners use condoms.” ICW Global looks forward to creating spaces and being heard for HIV-positive women in all political and programmatic areas. Especially commercial sex workers.

Addressing human rights in the context of HIV means universal access to care, treatment, support, sexual health and rights, and reproductive health and rights.
Reproduction and an active sex life are human rights. With universal access to care, treatment and support HIV is a manageable disease. We can and do have children, have sex and live long and healthy lives. While barriers to these rights remain, it is HIV-positive women and girls who are best placed to understand the barriers we face in accessing the care and treatment we need. We are also the best people to develop, design and deliver better ways of making treatment available to HIV-positive women and girls around the world. This includes making sure that HIV-positive women and girls are trained and employed to act as treatment advocates or treatment distributors. Without this involvement ICW Global believes the barriers that prevent women and girls accessing treatment will not be adequately addressed.

Every day, women living with HIV realize that HIV is more than a disease, as the emotional toll of coping with stigma and discrimination is often worse than the disease itself. Although it would be easier, HIV/AIDS cannot be addressed only as a health issue only. Rather, the fight to address HIV is a fight to restore health and human dignity to the millions of women living with HIV.