While emphasising that the HIV/Aids pandemic is an emergency
at the medical, social and economic level, the Assembly calls upon
parliaments and governments of the Council of Europe to:
9.1 ensure that their laws, policies
and practices respect human rights in the context of HIV/Aids, in particular
the right to education, work, privacy, protection and access to
prevention, treatment, care and support;
9.2 protect people living with HIV/Aids from all forms of
discrimination in both the public and private sectors, promote gender
equality, ensure privacy and confidentiality in research involving
human subjects, and provide for speedy and effective judicial, administrative
and civil remedies in the event of a violation of the rights of
people living with HIV/Aids;
9.3 ensure the development and accelerated implementation
of national strategies for women’s empowerment by, inter alia, ensuring
they have access to property rights, promoting and protecting women’s
full enjoyment of all human rights, and reducing their vulnerability
to HIV/Aids through the elimination of all forms of discrimination,
as well as all forms of violence against women and girls, including
harmful traditional and customary practices, abuse, rape and other
forms of sexual violence; and protect the right of women living
with HIV/Aids to make free decisions about their sexuality and reproductive
health, in particular by ensuring access to services that prevent
mother-to-child transmission of HIV and provide pregnant women with
access to long-term ARV treatment;
9.4 adopt and finance the measures necessary to ensure, on
a sustained basis and for all affected persons (irrespective of
social or legal status, gender, age or sexual orientation), the
availability and accessibility of quality services and information
for HIV/Aids prevention, management, treatment, care and support,
including the provision of means of HIV/Aids prevention such as
male and female condoms, sterile hypodermic needles, and basic preventive
care kits, as well as affordable ARV medication and other safe and
effective medicines, psychological support, diagnostics and related
technologies for all persons, with particular attention to vulnerable
individuals and groups such as women and children;
9.5 implement measures to increase the capacity of women and
adolescent girls to protect themselves from the risk of HIV infection,
principally through education, including peer education, and access
to the provision of health-care services, including those related
to sexual and reproductive health;
9.6 adopt the measures necessary to continue, intensify, combine,
make mutually beneficial and harmonise national and multinational
research and development efforts aimed at developing new treatments
against HIV/Aids, including medicines prepared specifically for
use in children living with HIV/Aids, new means of prevention and
new diagnostic tools and tests, including vaccines and female-controlled
prevention methods such as microbicides;
9.7 recognise the health, socio-economic and other effects
of HIV/Aids on individuals, families, societies and nations, and
to take the appropriate legislative and executive social measures
to halt its spread;
9.8 adopt and implement policies that respect the human rights
of persons living with HIV/Aids, and through all available media,
to advocate for and raise awareness of their rights;
9.9 develop and implement national legislation and policies
that address the needs and human rights of the growing number of
children orphaned and made vulnerable through the HIV/Aids pandemic;
9.10 ban compulsory HIV/Aids screening for people applying
for travel visas, asylum, jobs or enrolment at a university in favour
of voluntary testing;
9.11 establish co-ordinated, participatory, transparent and
accountable national policies and programmes to combat HIV/Aids,
and to translate these national policies into action at district
and local levels, wherever possible involving, in development and
implementation, non-governmental and community-based organisations,
religious organisations, the private sector, and more importantly, people
living with HIV/Aids, and particularly the most vulnerable among
them, including women and children.
