Global Policy Forum

Delegates preparing for a major UN AIDS summit missed a weekend deadline to reach consensus on a draft declaration. Talks resume on Tuesday. More than 100 countries have spent the past six days in marathon debates on a declaration that sets among its goals spending up to $10 billion a year by 2005 to combat HIV, which has devastated African nations and is rapidly spreading through Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe.

But too many parts of the statement, which includes a specific list of goals, were still in dispute on both prevention as well as access to treatment, necessitating another week of negotiations, delegates said. The first UN AIDS summit is scheduled for June 25-27.

As in a women's conference last June, a group of Islamic countries, including Egypt, Libya, Iran, Sudan and Pakistan, oppose language on sexual education for women and on widespread access to condoms for women as well as men. Most objectionable to these countries, delegates said, were calls for ``the participation of vulnerable groups'' such as homosexuals, prostitutes and prisoners. ``They want to say homosexuality and prostitution are irresponsible sexual behavior, which is unacceptable to most of us and which only increases the stigma of AIDS,'' said Giles Raguin, a member of the French delegation.

Australian Ambassador Penny Wensley, co-chairman of the meetings along with Senegal's UN ambassador, Ibra Deguene Ka, said she expected ``some pretty bumpy passages.'' ``There is a very strong wish on the part of many member states to focus on protecting and promoting the health of the groups that are most vulnerable and at greatest risk to HIV infection,'' she told reporters.

``That would include children in especially difficult circumstances, men who have sex with men, sex workers and their clients, drug users and their sexual partners, persons confined in institutions and prison populations, refugees, internally displaced persons and people separated from their families due to work or conflict,'' she said. Another point of contention in the document is advocacy of needle exchange programs for drug addicts, which are illegal in many countries.

In contrast, major Latin American nations are in the forefront of endorsing most of the declaration, drafted by Wensley and Ka, but want the world to go further and aim for the right to free health care. Brazil, which has the only successful AIDS treatment program in the developing world, manufactures some generic antiretroviral drugs and is being charged by the United States for violating world trade laws. It contends its programs show the extremely poor in remote areas can keep to a regime of taking pills if money and drugs are there for simple clinics.

The conference comes at a pivotal moment in the AIDS battle. Money from foundations and some governments is becoming available and pharmaceutical companies have drastically reduced the cost of drugs to poor countries. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has made the battle against AIDS his personal priority, after years of floundering on the issue until a separate UNAIDS body was set up in 1995. Annan has proposed a global fund to combat AIDS. He believes $7 billion to $10 billion is needed annually compared to $1 billion now spent in the developing world.

About 36 million people are living with AIDS or HIV infection, 25 million of them in sub-Sahara Africa, AIDS is spreading rapidly in the Caribbean, India, China and eastern and central Europe, UN figures show. Despite relatively successful AIDS prevention programs in Senegal, Uganda and elsewhere, treatment is nearly nonexistent in Africa. Of the 3 or 4 million Africans in advance stages of the disease, only some 10,000 receive antiretroviral drugs.

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