The meeting was three days long. On
the first day, civil society and government met separately. The civil society
meeting was organized by APCASO and Seven Sisters. The day began with a series
of formal presentations by NGOs and regional networks, including a performance
art piece by YouthLEAD on the invisibility and lack of input by young Key
Affected Populations (or KAPS: that is, drug users, sex workers, MSM,
transgender, and migrants). Right before lunch, the civil society
representatives split into four working groups, using the “Getting to Zero”
framework for discussion created by UNAIDS:

1) Revolutionizing prevention: Getting to zero infections

2) Catalyzing treatment, care and support: Getting to zero AIDS-related deaths

3) Human rights and legal environment: What will it take to get to zero HIV-related stigma and discrimination?

4) Increasing financial sustainability, national ownership and capacity-building for effective programming

Each of these four groups brainstormed recommendations – though we only had about an hour to finalize them before
lunch.

On the second day, civil society and
government met in plenary sessions in the morning. In the afternoon, they split
again into breakout groups following the same four topics (prevention,
treatment, human rights, and financing). The human rights group, which I
joined, was split into four sub-groups assigned by UNAIDS: youth, women and
girls, stigma and discrimination, and criminalization. I joined the
criminalization group, which was a nice diverse mix of a representative from
the Asia-Pacific Network of Sex Workers, an Indonesian IDU activist, a few PLWHA
representatives from the Pacific Islands, from CARAM-Asia, and representatives
from the governments of Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and other countries, as well
as a few people from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Edmund
Settle from UNDP. Nepal also had a medical doctor/police officer in our group,
who was an active participant in discussions and submitted pleasantly to a
certain amount of teasing by the rest of us about police reform.

Bram, a representative of CARAM-Asia,
a migrants’ rights group, facilitated the discussion. One of the key issues
that I raised in this session on behalf of Asia Catalyst was the need to create
routes to registration for NGOs, and to protect their right to freedom of
expression.

At the end of the day, we reconvened
and put all our recommendations together, creating a list of about 27
recommendations altogether. By this point most people were tired and left for
the cocktail reception, so Bram, Jane Wilson from UNAIDS and I worked together
to consolidate the recommendations (since some were repetitive). We then turned
these over to a UN committee which worked until quite late at night to get them
down to a short list of 18 recommendations for the whole human rights track.

On the third day, each group’s
recommendations were posted on the walls in the meeting rooms where we had met
the day before, and in a “marketplace” exercise, the whole plenary walked
around reading the recommendations and adding their suggestions using post-it
notes. These suggestions were then incorporated into our final recommendations.
Those were presented to the plenary session. As a result of this process, the final
Asia-Pacific human rights recommendations were as follows:

Harmful laws and practices

·
Ensure conformity of national laws, policies and practices with international human
rights standards, norms, commitments, specifically UN Guidelines of HIV and
Human Rights.

·
Fulfill the obligations, commitments and pledges already made by member States, through
the implementation of HIV relevant country specific recommendations from UN
Human Rights Treaty Bodies, Special Procedures Universal Periodic Review.

National and regional human rights institutions, including courts

·
Ensure independence of national and regional institutions and courts so that they can
ensure accountability of States

·
National human rights institutions should advocate for the right to health and other
human rights of Key Affected Populations and their sexual partners.

·
Promote and ensure that redress mechanisms are supported by states at local and
national levels with regular reporting schedules.

·
Strengthen enforcement of existing supportive laws and systems to ensure that Key Affected
Populations and women have access to rights violation reporting mechanisms

·
Building on existing commitments, recognize the stigma and discrimination faced by
people of diverse sexual orientation and gender identities in ASEAN, SAARC, PIF
(all regional intergovernmental bodies).

·
Maximize existing sector-based mechanisms for reporting rights based violations in the
work place in accordance with the global ILO labour standards,

·
Include a stigma indicator in regular government HIV and human rights reporting to
international mechanisms.

Media

·
Use media as a tool for story-telling to put a face on people living with HIV, and
to promote greater awareness of women’s human rights.

Civil
society

·
Ensure the ability of community based organization to register and protect the rights
of key affected populations to freedom of expression and opinion.

·
Involve youth KAPs in processes of decision-making, policy development and
implementation.

·
Reduce legal age of consent for health services.

Law enforcement/criminal justice mechanisms

·
Eliminate discriminatory law enforcement practices such as compulsory testing of KAPs and
use of condoms and needles as evidence of criminal behavior.

·
Establish mechanisms for civil society to partner with police and security agencies;
including KAPs participation in HIV, GBV (women and transgender) and human
rights education.

·
Ensure protection for affected and infected children, including children of KAPs, to
access to basic services and family/community care.

·
Provide protective laws and services for street and migrant children.

Religion

·
Sensitize religious leaders, academics and organizations to the human rights of KAPs.

Some thoughts on the Asia-Pacific regional consultation

1. UN meetings – valuable opportunity, or a misuse of resources?

A number of people I know and respect, including a few who were actually at this meeting, argue that UN meetings like
this one are a waste of resources. Organizations, economists and rights
advocates have criticized the Millennium Development Goals for both economic and
political reasons. Meetings like this consultation, which feed into the MDG
evaluations, cost a tremendous amount of money, including the cost of renting
expensive rooms at large hotels, flying in participants from around the region,
paying for food and drink and accommodations, and so on. Asia Catalyst paid for
our travel to the meeting out of our own travel budget, since our presence in
Bangkok was for other meetings and capacity-building work with the Myanmar
National Network of Sex Workers. However, I have to confess that about half the
time I spent in the consultation was spent looking guiltily up at the beautiful
chandeliers in the plenary room and wondering how many ARVs for someone in, for
instance, Laos could have been bought with the fees for the conference venue.

At the same time, there is some
usefulness in getting human rights principles into these recommendations,
because once they are established as part of a standard endorsed by the UN,
they can then be referenced and promoted in the countries where we work. The
more we talk about human rights at settings like this, the more space we create
to advocate for them in countries that find them ‘sensitive’.  And for a surprising number of the government participants,
engaging with human rights on a practical, policy-making level was a relatively
new experience, as was meeting with sex worker and drug user advocates; so
there was a public education/capacity-building aspect to our discussions.

Finally, the most interesting and even
exciting moments of the discussion on criminalization involved drawing on a
strength of the UN – the ability to bring together both government and NGO to
share their experiences working on the issue in different countries. As a
result of their involvement, we included some recommendations that were
relatively new, such as the recommendation to lower the age of consent for
medical care in Thailand.

All in all, I did wind up feeling that the meeting was useful. But I also wonder if it could have been done on a
smaller budget.

2. Thoughts on Process: Who speaks?

Of course, meetings with civil society
always raise questions about representation. Many people would like to go to a consultation
in Bangkok, but who was actually there and who was not? Some networks chose
representatives through a democratic process; others picked people they wanted
to expose to a larger group of contacts.
Some NGOs, such as Asia Catalyst, were there simply because we happened
to be passing through town. There was only one Chinese civil society representative
at the whole meeting, disproportionate considering that China represents a
quarter of the world’s population. The process of selection of civil society
representatives is always a bit haphazard at these things; but I’m not sure
there’s enough self-examination by those of us in civil society about how we
decide who will speak for us.

At the same time, not everyone who
goes participates actively. Some people from marginalized communities may not
be fluent in English, or may not feel comfortable speaking out in a forum like
this. As a result, the most outspoken, English-fluent people tend to dominate
the discussions (including non-Asians, such as myself). As a result, issues may
be unintentionally marginalized, despite everyone’s avowed intention to empower
KAPs.

A third thing I noted is that while we
were discussing human rights and making recommendations about human rights
policy, we had few Asian lawyers and human rights experts at the meeting. While
there certainly are people from the region with that specific area of
expertise, such as Lawyers Committee in India, there were few legal experts
from Asia in the human rights group. As a result there was a tendency to create
vague recommendations, or to confuse human rights and legal framework issues
with other areas.  And the process of
developing recommendations itself was often a bit confusing, with UN staff
sometimes unsure what was supposed to happen when.

Nonetheless, I really appreciated the
opportunity to represent Asia Catalyst at the session, to meet new colleagues,
to hear about the efforts of a very diverse range of Asia-Pacific governments
and NGOs to wrestle with these issues at home, and to share our thoughts about
how to protect human rights as part of the AIDS response. In the final stage,
the recommendations from this forum will be combined with recommendations from
other regional forums and presented at the High-Level Summit on HIV/AIDS in New
York, June 8-10, 2011. It will be interesting to see how they come out.

Meg Davis is the executive director of Asia Catalyst.