By Ken Oh
Last Monday, the United Nations issued a statement applauding the United States and the Republic of Korea for lifting travel bans on people living with HIV/AIDS(PLWHA). The US ban had been in effect for 22 years, and the South Korean ban had been similarly entrenched. Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, hailed the parallel policy changes as “a victory for human rights on two sides of the globe”.
January 2010
Happy New Year!
Here’s the latest from our new Brooklyn office. Please help spread the word – we’re looking for graduate and undergraduate interns for spring and summer 2010. Details all the way down.
by Hye Gi Shim
“To be a journalist is to bear witness,” wrote Roger Cohen of The New York Times, “The rest is no more than ornamentation.” Today, bearing witness is made easier than ever thanks to the revolution in information and communication technology. The power to find, produce, and distribute information has expanded through the Internet and via digital cameras and cell phones leading to a growth of citizen journalists — people without professional training in journalism who produce, augment, or fact-check the news.
Asia is home to some of the most wired countries in the world (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan) as well as to some of the most restricted ones (North Korea, Burma, Cambodia). The rising tide of the Internet, however, is lifting all boats. Citizen journalists are sharing opinions about corruption and food safety in Cambodia and China and are influencing presidential elections in South Korea and India, and influencing the outcome of major events.
Check out the new website launched by Paulo Longo Research Institute in honor of the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (yes, there really is a day for everything), www.plri.org. The site looks like a good resource for news and information on sex work, harm reduction and human rights issues. A recent wander through the site turned up these things:
The site was just launched yesterday, so there aren’t a huge number of entries yet; hopefully these will be filled out as the site develops. It would also be great if links below the abstracts led you right to the article – some just link to the host website. Put this together with AIDSLEX, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network’s new site on AIDS law, and finding resources on AIDS and human rights online just got a little bit easier.
Today and tomorrow, December 14-15, the executive board of UNITAID will vote on whether to move forward with plans for a patent pool. A patent pool is a consortium of companies that share a license to a particular product or technology. In this case, manufacturers of AIDS drugs would give a limited number of generic manufacturers the right to produce those drugs. Competition between the generic manufacturers would then drive down the price of drugs in countries where many people currently cannot afford AIDS drugs.
Controversy has roiled over the patent pool idea since some have suggested that middle-income countries should be excluded. A lot of those countries are in Asia; see this letter from APN+, the network of people living with HIV in Asia, which clearly lays out the issues.
