Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network

Overview

The fight against AIDS can’t be won without defending human rights. In too many places, admitting you have HIV can get you fired, evicted, shunned, or even killed. In such a world, even if HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care programs were magically available everywhere, not everyone would be able to get them. That’s why we fight AIDS by fighting stigma, discrimination and abuse. And that’s why we need your help.

Mission

The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network promotes the human rights of people living with and vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. We turn research into action by working with those most affected by HIV/AIDS, making legal and human rights arguments, interpreting court decisions, and advocating to governments and policy-making bodies around the world.

Program

Around the world, human rights violations fuel social marginalization and risk of HIV. Women, people who use drugs, prisoners, sex workers and men who have sex with men face higher risk of HIV due to discrimination and other human rights abuses.

Whether advising prisoners’ support groups, addressing United Nations meetings, conducting workshops for front-line AIDS organizations, talking to the media, or answering requests for assistance from civil society organizations, we work with, and on behalf of, such marginalized populations — people whose voices are rarely listened to, despite the fact that they suffer most from the epidemic. All of our work is firmly grounded in sound legal analysis and human rights principles.

“Success in our struggle with the epidemic demands that we overcome stigma and encourage openness, that we challenge abuses fuelled by poverty, ignorance and fear, and achieve real safeguards for the rights of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. Through its analysis and advocacy — including imaginative and productive partnerships with other organizations — the Legal Network continues to make vital contributions to the global movement toward these goals."

—Justice Edwin Cameron, Supreme Court of Appeal, South Africa

Impact

Since 1992, the Legal Network has helped civil society organizations around the world defend the rights of people who suffer HIV/AIDS-related stigma, discrimination, criminalization, and abuse.

“It is imperative that the HIV/AIDS crisis be understood in human rights terms. An explicitly rights-based direction is a powerful force for progress against the pandemic. The Legal Network has been a global leader in advancing the cause of protecting, respecting and fulfilling the rights of people affected by and living with HIV/AIDS. —Stephen Lewis, United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for AIDS in Africa

Countries of Operation

Canada, Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Russian Federation, China, Indonesia, Thailand