Hiv/Aids Epidemic, Human Rights and Global Justice

This article maps out some of the most burning political, legal and social issues related to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, human rights protection and global justice. The article will focus particularly on the problems that the poor, developing countries face in their attempts to combat HIV/AIDS in relation to the human rights framework. The article will on the one hand, discuss human rights and HIV/AIDS from the point of view of ‘global justice’. On the other hand, it explores local and national political and legal quandaries that many developing countries face in their efforts to deal with the epidemic. Thus, my aim is, first, to identify the problems involved in the debates on conflicting rights; second, to discuss the ethical framework related to the conflicts between rights and responsibilities; and third, to analyse who the duty bearers are in relation to the claimed rights as well as to clarify their responsibilities, obligations and duties – both in global and local contexts. I shall show that while the main obstacle to human rights protection in the context of global AIDS is still the lack of international commitment to share scarce resources equally particularly when dealing with the virus (whether we talk about prevention or treatment), other serious ethical issues arise when we use the language of rights – more widely the human rights framework – to justify ‘double standards’ in global HIV/AIDS programmes. My main thesis is that in order to find any consistent international guidelines for ‘global bioethics’ dealing with HIV/AIDS, there is a need to untangle the arguments for conflicting rights in relation to global and local responsibilities.