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Is the International Aids Conference advancing equity and equality in the quest to end Aids?

Is the International Aids Conference advancing equity and equality in the quest to end Aids?
Members and supporters of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) march to the Constitutional Court to thank it for what it has done for people living with HIV on December 10, 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The march held in celebration of TAC’s 20 years of existence, fighting for the rights of people with HIV-Aids. (Photo: Gallo Images / Netwerk24 / Felix Dlangamandla)
Anele Yawa
By Anele Yawa
24 Jul 2024
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Treatment Action Campaign and and partner health rights organisation have taken un unprecedented decision to boycott the 25th International Aids Conference, currently under way in Munich, Germany. The organisations say this follows the failure by the International Aids Society to critically engage on pertinent issues affecting them prior to the conference.

Dear Professor Lewin

 This letter should be read in line with previous correspondence to the International Aids Society spearheaded by the Health Justice Initiative (and of which the Treatment Action Campaign was a signatory) and with debates held about the value of the conference, and what it achieves, over the past few years.

We write to you as the Treatment Action Campaign’s National Council, our organisation’s highest decision-making body. The Treatment Action Campaign is a South African membership-based health activist organisation. We advocate for the right to health specifically, and human rights broadly. Our members are overwhelmingly poor people who need the public health system to work, and who are the first to notice when it doesn’t. By organising locally, our members demand accountability where the services are actually delivered.

Treatment Action Campaign has almost 8,000 fully paid members in more than 285 active branches, from eight of South Africa’s nine provinces. The majority of members are black women living with, and affected by, HIV. The organisation’s branches are in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. 

Read more: In Giyani, HIV/Aids patients are giving up their meds because of their inability to pay for transport or food

This year Treatment Action Campaign and some of our partners took the unprecedented decision to boycott the 25th International Aids Conference, currently under way in Munich, Germany. This followed the failure by the International Aids Society to critically engage on pertinent issues affecting us prior to the conference. We honour the fact that this conference has historically been a critical site of the struggle to protect and advance the rights of people living with HIV. However, the tone-deaf nature of conference organisers to the needs of people from the Global South, including those currently facing a genocide in Gaza, forces us to ask publicly whether the conference is still relevant as a place of radical engagement and pro-human rights change.

 Historical relevance


Treatment Action Campaign and many other health activists across the globe have a long history of using international Aids conferences to mobilise and contest bad governmental policy, as well as private and public powers on broader issues such as financing, access to affordable medicines and strategies to end Aids.

From the Vancouver conference in 1996 on, these conferences have left an indelible mark on the Aids response. For example, activism at the Durban Conference in 2000 boosted the fight for global access to treatment, with the Durban Declaration and powerful interventions from Nkosi Johnson, Justice Edwin Cameron and Nelson Mandela shaping the Aids response nationally and internationally.

During the Aids conference in Toronto in 2006, Treatment Action Campaign occupied then South African health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang’s garlic, lemon and beetroot stand, as well as participating in protests targeting Big Pharma at the conference. The brave speech by Stephen Lewis, then the UN Special Envoy on Aids in Africa, tipped the scales against Aids denialism in South Africa.

A protester holds a poster in support of Gazans during a march in solidarity with Palestine in Paris, France, on 18 May 2024.  (Photo: EPA-EFE/Christophe Petit Tesson)



At this current conference allegations abound of visa denial of brown and black people, with anecdotal evidence from many activists from the Global South complaining about being denied visas to Germany. We also reject the tight control of protest, turning it into powerless theatre. For example, the conference’s code of conduct makes it clear that any genuine contestation of ideas and genuine protest action will not take place. Aids activists have always been committed to peaceful protest, but it is up to us to decide how, when and why we will protest. Word from activists at the Aids conference shows that social justice movements and activists are not being allowed to embark in any meaningful form of protest or picketing, but rather staged actions that have been the modus operandi at recent conferences.

The genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and Israel’s threat to peace and human rights


Earlier this year, activists (including Treatment Action Campaign) led by the Health Justice Initiative wrote to the Board of the International Aids Society and other international health entities, raising a number of concerns. Among other things, activists demanded that the International Aids Society conference “devote a plenary session to Gaza, including a moment of silence for healthcare workers during the opening ceremony”.

We further demanded that the International Aids Society “not permit speeches, exhibitions or pavilion stalls from/of genocidal governments/state officials as well as from/of pharmaceutical and health companies supporting genocide”. You can read the correspondence here.

Read more: Universal health coverage a crucial step for healthcare equity, but tackling poverty is key

While concessions were made, with the International Aids Society releasing a very short press statement in May 2024 in solidarity with healthcare workers stating and calling for the “protection of healthcare facilities and workers” and promising via email correspondence that it would discuss it “in two sessions: one dedicated to the health of displaced people in wartime, which would include testimonials from individuals directly working in ongoing crises, including Palestine (along with Ukraine, Armenia, and Sudan), and another symposia session on migration, mobile populations and HIV, where Gaza will also be featured”, we firmly believe that this is not enough and is a major step down from the radical interventions of past comrades such as Dr Mark Wainberg.

Activists have also raised concerns about the conference being held in Germany because of Germany’s active support to, and arming of, the Israeli government that is perpetuating and committing genocidal attacks against the people of Palestine. It is also noteworthy that German police have been heavy handed in their response to pro-Palestinian protests. It is baffling that the International Aids Society decided to continue to host the conference in the country.

According to the Lancet, the war on Gaza may have caused up to 186,000 deaths so far, mostly children and women and including many health workers and journalists. It has destroyed the entire infrastructure of Palestine, including the healthcare system, which leaves the majority of public healthcare users, including people living with HIV and Aids, with no access to their life-saving medicines. Other health outbreaks have been highlighted, including a rise in polio cases.

Treatment Action Campaign believes that Aids activists do not demand respect for international law and human rights selectively. Struggles for justice and rights are connected. We have always been a movement founded on solidarity.

What is achieved by the International Aids Conference?


All of this forces us to ask whether the International Aids Conference continues to serve any useful purpose in the struggle to end Aids, and particularly what our communities stand to gain by our participation. We are all, after all, supposedly there to improve the lives of people living with and affected by HIV in the communities we come from.

What actually are the benefits of this conference for community organisations such as ours? For us, at the moment, they seem very few.

There is a danger that this conference represents the worst of what Aids activism has become, and that the close bond between science, law and activism that characterised earlier conferences is not as strong. Many NGOs and activists now seem to treat the conference as a mere social gathering and an opportunity for a holiday.

Members and supporters of the Treatment Action Campaign march to the Constitutional Court to thank it for what it has done for people living with HIV on 10 December, 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa. (Photo: Gallo Images /Netwerk24/Felix Dlangamandla)



We know from hard experience that too many people are still dying of Aids, while others are still being infected with HIV; we know that there are attacks on LQBTQI communities in Uganda and many other countries; we know that health systems are failing; we know that funding is decreasing. We know that rich countries are funding war rather than care. The question is, what are we doing to change it and what role does the International Aids Society play?

To us, this conference appears to have strayed far from addressing the lives of poor and vulnerable people with HIV. In this critical moment in the Aids response, with President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief and broader funding uncertainty, with war and the increased criminalisation of key populations in many contexts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, this conference represents a lost opportunity to actually put people first.

We therefore demand the following from the International Aids Society:

  1. A commitment to hosting future conferences in the Global South, in countries most affected by the HIV pandemic.

  2. That potential host countries’ human rights records be at the forefront of the adjudication processes.

  3. Potential host countries commit in advance to provide visas to all participants without any unfair discrimination or prejudice.

  4. The Aids conference reverts to being a conference that genuinely centres communities affected by HIV, instead of mere platitudes in its theme.

  5. The International Aids Society publishes the full costs of Aids conferences.

  6. The International Aids Society ensures that International Aids Society organising committees are representative of affected communities. As it stands, only 10 of 24 committee members for Aids 2024 were from the Global South or people of colour.

  7. Conference organisers foster a culture where the contestation of ideas is welcomed.

  8. The International Aids Society conference makes bold proclamations in support of key and vulnerable populations that have been negatively affected by increased criminalised settings, war and genocidal behaviour such as that exhibited by Israel and supported by countries like the US, Germany, and the UK.


 Our participation in future Aids conferences is contingent on the belief that these conferences respect the rights to freedom of expression, particularly protest, as well as human rights to health and dignity, meaningful representation and respect for international law.

Finally, we request that this letter be circulated to all conference delegates and read out at a conference plenary.  

Sincerely,
Anele Yawa, TAC General Secretary on behalf of TAC National Council. DM

This open letter has been endorsed by the following organisations: Rural Health Advocacy Project (RHAP), SECTION27, TB Accountability Consortium (TBAC), African Alliance

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