[COMMENTARY] South Korea Gets Unearned Praise, Again, For Lifting HIV Travel Ban

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By Ken Oh

At the opening ceremony for the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington DC, UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe announced that the South Korea had just lifted its travel restrictions on people living with HIV. The announcement met with a wave of applause. Hours before the speech, Kim Bong-hyun, Deputy Minister for Multilateral and Global Affairs, had announced that the South Korea had lifted travel restrictions on HIV-positive travelers to the country. There were only two problems with this momentous announcement: first, South Korea had made more or less the same announcement in 2010; and second, it is not clear that South Korea has made any of the needed legal reforms since then. Numerous discriminatory restrictions on visitors living with HIV/AIDS remain in place.

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[COMMENTARY] Where Are the Key Affected Populations at the International AIDS Conference?

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By Sara L.M. Davis 

 
Background 
This spring, when the International AIDS Society announced the program for AIDS 2012, the big HIV/AIDS conference that recently concluded in Washington D.C., the MSM Global Fund expressed concern that “only a fraction of high-quality abstracts” from men who have sex with men (MSM) had been accepted. Other activists and networks representing Key Affected Populations (KAPs) concurred in emails sent to the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (ITPC) list that they too felt they were being excluded from the program.

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[REPORT] Washington, D.C.: What We’ll Remember from AIDS 2012

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Meg Davis and Lanlan at AIDS 2012 in the Global Village.

This year Asia Catalyst sent four Chinese activists and ten staff members and volunteers to the AIDS 2012 conference in D.C. Here are a few short reflections of and pictures from our time.

  • Our session on civil society in China was a really great, thoughtful, lively and overall optimistic discussion between three rising young advocates, Zheng Huang (China Sex Worker Organization Network), Yuan Wenli (China Network of Women Against HIV/AIDS), and Shen Tingting (Korekata AIDS Law Center). I only wish it had been on a platform where the speakers could have reached a larger audience.

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[PROFILE] Shen Tingting: Researcher For Action

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Shen Tingting, a prominent HIV/AIDS and human rights advocate in Beijing, China, has been working with marginalized communities since her college days. In 2007, she, along with Li Dan, co-founded the Korekata AIDS Law Center. Until 2012, she was the deputy director of its parent organization, Dongjen Center for Human Rights Education and Action [https://www.dongjen.org/]. At Dongjen, she founded and managed an outreach program for sex workers in Beijing after she earned her masters from Renmin University in Social Welfare in 2009. Currently Tingting is a visiting research fellow at Asia Catalyst.

Tingting has written and advocated on a range of rights-related HIV/AIDS issues, including testing and confidentiality, compensation for victims of China’s blood disaster, and the rights of sex workers and drug users. She is the author of a new report on HIV testing and human rights in China, Real-Name Testing: Is China Ready? and previously conducted research to co-author a major bilingual human rights report, China’s Blood Disaster: The Way Forward. Her articles have also appeared in the HIV/AIDS Law and Policy Review.
She will present a poster on compensation for China’s HIV blood disaster on Tuesday, July 24th from 12:30 to 2:30pm and will speak in several other sessions. In the run-up to this year’s International AIDS Conference, AIDS 2012, Tingting sat down with Asia Catalyst to chat about her work.

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[REPORT] HIV Real-Name Testing: Is China Ready? (2012)

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By Meg Davis and Shen Tingting

About 4 months ago, Guangxi and Hunan provinces announced plans to require real-name testing for HIV, and the Ministry of Health expressed support stating it should be a national policy. Immediately there was a huge outcry from the China Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, the China Gay Male Health Forum, and others.
A joint report from Asia Catalyst and Korekata AIDS Law Center calls on China to protect patient confidentiality, provide counseling, and end compulsory testing in order to encourage more people to get tested for HIV. Without these basic rights, Chinese government programs that aim to expand HIV testing will not succeed.

The following briefly outlines our joint report and conclusions, but first we want to tell you about a community-run HIV testing program right here in Beijing, which has been dealing with these issues on the ground.

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