New Ugandan HIV and AIDS law jeopardizes health of women, men, and children

By Anne Stangl

*This blog originally appeared on ICRW and Thomas Reuters Foundation 

Last week, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed into law a bill that will likely harm the health of Uganda’s men, women, and children for years to come and could set the country back decades in progress in reducing the transmission of HIV.

The new law, the HIV and AIDS Prevention and Control Act of 2014, criminalizes the transmission of HIV, makes it legal for doctors to disclose their patients’ HIV status to partners and families without consent, and, last but not least, calls for mandatory testing for pregnant women and their partners. To be blunt, it is nothing short of a major step backward for a country that, for 30 years, has been a leader in tackling HIV head on.

A doctor draws blood from a man to check for HIV/AIDS at a mobile testing unit in Ndeeba,
a suburb in Uganda's capital Kampala, May 2014. REUTERS/Edward Echwalu

While Ugandan legislators insist that the goal of the new law is to protect the public’s health, the new law, in effect, will do little more than stigmatize and discriminate against men and women living with HIV and will likely result in fewer women and girls – and men and boys – seeking and adhering to treatment that could literally save their lives. This will lead to a huge step back in any progress made in tackling the epidemic, which affects over 1.5 million Ugandans.

This law is simply unnecessary. The law mandates that pregnant women and their partners get tested, yet research shows that women are already getting tested and previous research has found that mandatory testing has actually been shown to lead some women to avoiding getting antenatal care all together.  This new law will serve as yet another repressive measure targeted at women, but ultimately affecting the health of men and entire families, including their children.

Researching HIV stigma in Uganda for my dissertation in 2005, I got to see up close the barriers and challenges that face people living with HIV on a daily basis. Yet, I also witnessed an amazing transformation in communities where, for the first time, people living with HIV were able to access life-saving antiretroviral treatment. As men and women who were on death’s door became healthy, they were able to begin working and could contribute to their families and communities again. No longer were they viewed as a burden. No longer were they feared. No longer were their opinions disregarded because they ‘would soon die.’ Neighbors, who had previously shunned them, began stopping by to ask: how had they become healthy again? Could their relative or friend also get access to these medicines? Communities wounded by years of losing so many to AIDS, struggling with stigma and discrimination, began to mend.

Following the roll-out of antiretroviral therapy in Uganda, increases in HIV testing and care-seeking were tremendous. Home-based testing campaigns achieved over 95% acceptance in most communities. Given the gains achieved from a supportive government response to the epidemic, which was lauded globally for its high involvement of people living with HIV, I find myself wondering why the Ugandan government would go backwards. Why risk these tremendous gains, and the very lives of their citizens, by passing such a discriminatory law? 

While researchers are working every day to discover new strategies and technologies to bring an end to HIV and AIDS, we already know what will not work: stigmatizing and discriminating against those living with HIV. We know that when individuals, communities, and, as is the case here, governments stigmatize and discriminate against those who are living with HIV, others decide not to seek out treatment or stop adhering to their medication, which contributes to the further spread of HIV. When laws mandate testing and criminalize HIV transmission, expectant mothers are likely to avoid seeking health care, putting their health – and their babies’ health – at risk.

To be sure, the signing of this bill marks a sad occasion. But this new law must not be the end of the story, especially when Ugandans lives hang in the balance.

Advocates, policy makers and researchers alike must work together to urge the Government of Uganda to weigh the risk of backsliding on hard-won gains against HIV, which could result from criminalization and mandatory testing under this law. We must urge the Government of Uganda to use all appropriate means to reconsider the law, including during the development of regulations for its implementation by the Minister of Health. And lastly, we must encourage the Government of Uganda to once again be a leader in the global response to HIV by championing evidence-based, inclusive and supportive HIV policies instead of policies driven by fear and stigma.

We’ve come too far in the fight against HIV to let discriminatory laws, such as this one recently signed by President Museveni, derail decades of progress and jeopardize the health of millions of women, men, and children.