UN urges nations to lift HIV travel ban

2nd Nov, 2009

UNITED NATIONS — UN chief Ban Ki-moon hailed US President Barack Obama's removal
of a decades-old travel ban on HIV-positive visitors, and urged other countries
to do the same.

"I congratulate President Obama on announcing the removal of the travel
restrictions for people living with HIV from entering the United States," Ban
said on Saturday in a statement released by UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations
Program on HIV/AIDS.

"I urge all other countries with such restrictions to take steps to remove them
at the earliest."

Obama announced his administration would overturn on Monday a controversial US
policy that had been in place since 1987. The ban on foreign nationals with
HIV/AIDS visiting the United States will effectively be lifted early next year.

"Such restrictions, strongly opposed by UNAIDS, are discriminatory and do not
protect public health," the program said.

Ban has made the lifting of stigma and discrimination connected with AIDS a
personal mission, first calling on countries to lift their travel restrictions
in 2008 at a UN meeting on the disease.

The travel restrictions "should fill us all with shame," Ban told a global AIDS
conference in August 2008.

According to UNAIDS, Ban's home country of South Korea is "in the last stages of
removing travel restrictions," while China and Ukraine are among countries
considering following suit.

"Placing travel restrictions on people living with HIV has no public health
justification. It is also a violation of human rights," said UNAIDS executive
director Michel Sidibe.

On Friday, as he signed a bill reauthorizing funding for a federal program
providing HIV-related health care, Obama announced the repeal of the travel ban,
describing the 22-year-old policy as a "decision rooted in fear rather than
fact."

"If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like
it," Obama said.

"And that's why on Monday, my administration will publish a final rule that
eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year."

Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, signed legislation last year that removed
HIV from a list of diseases "of public health significance" that effectively
barred any person infected with HIV from entering the United States.

But the law was not implemented by the US Department of Health and Human
Services, which regulates US immigration authorities in some instances.

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