A Review of Regional and National Human Rights Based HIV and AIDS Policies and Frameworks in Eastern and Southern Africa

The study provides three broad recommendations for moving forward. Firstly, each country must conduct a comprehensive review of its legislation, and it should enact and reform legislation to fill gaps and correct inconsistencies in relation to AIDS and human rights. Secondly, regional economic communities and regional institutions must develop and approve model HIV and AIDS legislation to facilitate a comprehensive approach to HIV legislation and aid the push for harmonisation and domestication. Thirdly, parliamentary oversight, selfreview, and monitoring and evaluation mechanisms must be strengthened to increase implementation at the national, regional and international levels.

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HIV and Prisons in sub-Saharan Africa:
Opportunities for Action

This document presents an abridged analytical summary of the inventory of existing information on HIV among prison communities in sub-Saharan Africa, identifies gaps in information and proposes a framework for action. The key finding is that there is insufficient knowledge about the prison community, both in and out of correctional facilities. What is known is alarming and underscores the importance of acting rapidly to fill information gaps in order to better assess national situations, identify good practices and support more effective national policies, programs and service delivery. The document includes a section on next steps, which can be adapted to meet differing country circumstances.

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Human Rights Under Threat:
Four perspectives on HIV, AIDS and the law in Southern Africa

Despite the fact that Southern Africa is the epicenter of the HIV epidemic, there is a shortage of research and reflection coming from the sub-region itself. With the support of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA), the AIDS and Human Rights Research Unit, based at the Centre for the Study of AIDS and the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, in 2006 engaged in a research project to give a voice to Southern African perspectives on issues pertaining to HIV, AIDS, law and human rights. Four researchers were selected to address four human rights-related issues of increasing importance in the context of HIV and AIDS in the sub-region.

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Human Rights Protected?
Nine Southern African country reports on HIV, AIDS and the law

As its title indicates, Human rights protected? Nine Southern African country reports on HIV, AIDS and the law charts the extent to which human rights are protected in the legal systems of the Southern African states with very high HIV prevalence rates. These countries are Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Issues that are covered in the publication include access to health care, privacy, non-discrimination, labour rights, women's rights, children's rights, prisoners' rights and the government's oversight function.

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Legal Aspects of HIV/AIDS - A Guide for Policy and Law Reform

Dealing successfully with HIV/AIDS cuts across almost all areas of government responsibility, and as the breadth of the 65 topics included in the Guide shows, there are many ways in which laws and regulations can either underpin or undermine good public health programs and responsible personal behaviors. The Guide indicates that statutes relating to many areas of human endeavor - from intimate private conduct to international travel - can contribute to stigma, discrimination, and exclusion or, contrariwise, can avoid and help remedy these inequities. Thus, in order to create a supportive legal framework it is important that governments identify and address effectively any gaps or other problematic aspects of their legislation and regulatory systems.

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Handbook on HIV and Human Rights for National Human Rights Institutions

This Handbook is designed to assist national human rights institutions to integrate HIV into their mandate to protect and promote human rights. It provides a basic overview of the role of human rights in an effective response to the epidemic and suggests concrete activities that national institutions can carry out within their existing work. It also presents possibilities for engaging with the national HIV response in order to protect and promote human rights, in the context of the "Three Ones". This Handbook is primarily intended for use by staff of national human rights institutions, civil society organizations, networks of people living with HIV and national AIDS programmes. Government institutions and other partners of national institutions may also find it useful.

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Taking action against HIV
Handbook for parliamentarians no 15 - 2007

This Handbook emphasizes the importance of human rights because they are so essential to the response to AIDS. Parliaments have a central role to play in promulgating and overseeing the enforcement of national laws for an approach to HIV that is informed by evidence and by the International Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights. We hope that this Handbook will inspire and help parliaments and parliamentarians everywhere to intensify evidence-informed political leadership and to exercise fully their legislative, budgetary and oversight powers to tackle HIV in their communities and countries.

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Righting Stigma:
Exploring a rights-based approach to addressing stigma

The need to "right" stigma based on HIV and AIDS (in the sense of "setting stigma right") is much greater than the need to write about it in general terms. As others have pointed out, much has been written about stigma in the context of HIV and AIDS, but less about ways of addressing or combating stigma in such a context.1 Initial preoccupation to ascertain stigma has made place for efforts to explain and understand it, and eventually to find effective interventions to root out stigma. The contributions in this collection concentrate mainly on the role of the law and of rights, but it should be kept in mind that the law forms part of the political ordering of society, and functions against the background of social realities.