The administration of President George W. Bush has pulled back from a plan that would have required thousands of grass-roots AIDS organizations working overseas and partly funded by U.S. money to publicly declare their opposition to prostitution and sex trafficking.
Overseas AIDS groups that receive money directly from the U.S. government or through a federally funded U.S. charity already have to declare their opposition to prostitution.
The new policy was attempting to extract a similar pledge from the much larger universe of AIDS groups whose funding comes from multinational organizations that collect money from many countries, not just the United States.
Many AIDS organizations are highly critical of what they term the anti-prostitution “loyalty oath,” arguing it will make it harder to reach a crucial risk group – prostitutes – with prevention messages.
A document issued last week by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that grass-roots AIDS groups receiving money through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria had to make the declaration even though the Global Fund itself was exempt.
This would have meant that about 3.000 groups in 128 countries supported by the Global Fund would have to make the pledge – something that AIDS activists said would cause a mixture of fear and resentment in some nations.
The four-year-old fund so far has committed 3 billion US dollar (17,5 milliarder DKR), a third of it from the United States. Because organizations that do not make the pledge cannot get federal funds, the huge U.S. contribution to the Global Fund might have been at risk if the fund had balked at enforcing the requirement.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, Kevin W. Keane, said that the posting of the CDC document was “a misunderstanding.” The language “had not been fully reviewed and cleared,” he said. “We are removing that language.”
The policy was described in two “requests for applications,” one advertising a 2 million dollar contract for AIDS “education and behavior change” activities in Ethiopia, and the other a 5,8 million dollar contract for AIDS testing, counseling and treatment in Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland and Ivory Coast.
Randall L. Tobias, who directs the five-year, 15 billion dollar Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), learned of the CDC posting as he prepared to go to Africa to visit grant recipients.
The HHS spokesman said that Tobias, who oversees disbursement of U.S. global AIDS funding, had rescinded (ophævet-omstødt) the policy.
From its enactment in 2003, the Bush administrations global AIDS initiative included a requirement that groups getting U.S. money “have a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.” But over time, the designation of who was covered has changed.
Initially, the policy was applied only to foreign organizations operating overseas. U.S.-based charities were exempt because the Justice Department believed that forcing them to make the declaration might infringe their First Amendment right of free speech.
Also exempt were multilateral organizations such as the Global Fund, the World Health Organization, and UN agencies, whose policies or charters prohibit them from enforcing the national laws of member countries.
Last September, the Justice Department revised its advice and said it could “defend the constitutionality” of extending the anti-prostitution pledge to U.S. charities working overseas. They are now being asked to comply.
In February, however, a group that included CARE, the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and the International Center for Research on Women, among others, protested the policy in a letter to Tobias.
Nobody involved supports prostitution. The argument is whether making AIDS groups officially declare their opposition is helpful.
The framers of PEPFAR in the administration and Congress believe that prostitution should never be condoned or legalized because it creates a market for trafficking in women and girls and encourages the resulting cruelty, coercion and disease.
In addition, the PEPFAR law states specifically that nothing in the anti-prostitution clause “shall be construed to preclude” services to prostitutes, including testing, care and prevention services, including condoms.
But Maurice I. Middleburg, acting president of EngenderHealth, a 62-year-old public health charity working in 16 countries, said the declaration “risks further stigmatizing a population (prostitutes) that is already very difficult to reach.”
– We know that stigmatizing people with HIV, or who are presumed to have HIV, is one of the root causes of the pandemic. So why would we issue statements that might exacerbate (gøre det værre) that? he said.
Kilde: The Push Journal
