Tag Archives: AIDS

 
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Jailed in Cairo


 

This not only violates the most basic rights of people living with HIV. It also threatens public health, by making it dangerous for anyone to seek information about HIV prevention or treatment.

—Rebecca Schleifer, of Human Rights Watch (HRW), who addresses issues related to HIV and AIDS.

 

According to HRW, four Egyptian men were recently detained, shackled to hospital beds, and forcibly tested for HIV; two of the men tested positive.  Amnesty International and HRW state that these recent arrests are part of a larger scheme that started last fall, when two men were arrested during a fight in Cairo in October 2007. When one man stated that he was HIV-positive, the men were taken into custody and questioned by the division of the police that investigates questions related to public morality. Both men asserted that they were beaten and forced to undergo rectal examinations that were allegedly intended to prove homosexual behavior.  Homosexuality can be indirectly punished in Egypt by charging homosexuals under laws that punish obscenity, prostitution and debauchery. 

Abuse and torture by the police is not entirely uncommon in Egypt, an issue which was recently highlighted by camera-phone video footage of police raping a man with a stick.

Just as importantly, treating HIV/AIDS as a crime instead of a severe illness has the potential to dissuade unknown numbers of people from seeking testing and treatment in the country of approximately 75 million. 

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The Benghazi Six


It is a common belief in many countries around the world that HIV was developed by the American government. Nowhere has this belief affected so many lives than in Libya, where leader Muammar al-Gaddafi has publicly stated this belief and used it to the detriment of foreign workers in the country.

Gaddafi, who has held power in Libya since 1969 and is known as "Brother Leader and Guide of the Revolution," was quoted at the 2001 African summit on HIV/AIDS as saying that the HIV/AIDS crisis started when "CIA laboratories lost control over the virus which they were testing on black Haitian prisoners." Gaddafi has also blamed the CIA, as well as Israel's MOSSAD, for involvement in an ongoing case in Libya involving more than 400 children infected by HIV in a Libyan hospital.

The case, often referred to as the "Benghazi Six," involves a Palestinian doctor and five Bulgarian nurses held responsible for an eruption of HIV at the El-Fath Children's Hospital in Benghazi, Libya, despite the fact that scientific evidence has been found proving that the majority of children were infected prior to the foreign workers' arrival. Though the case has reached the courthouse several times, the most recent verdict, issued on December 19, 2006, sentenced the doctor and nurses to death.

Although the case has received surprisingly little attention in the United States, it prompted a campaign in Europe against Libya's policies, which in turn outraged the Arab Maghreb Union, which has called on all countries, especially European ones, to "adopt a positive attitude to the case of the medics sentenced to death and the HIV-infected children with a view to human and legal aspects of the issue, and lay aside [politicization]."

Currently the case is under appeal; the Bulgarian nurses filed on February 18, 2007. It remains unseen whether or not the Libyan court will accept the scientific evidence or continue to support beliefs that the Bulgarian, American, and Israeli governments are intent on infecting Libyans with HIV.

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