On this World AIDS Day – themed “Communities make the difference” – AIDS Action Europe proudly announces its support to HIV 2020: Community Reclaiming the Global Response conference, taking place in Mexico City on July 5-7, 2020.
In 2018, after the announcement of the next International AIDS Society Conference taking place in San Francisco/Oakland in 2020, an alliance of global, regional and national networks of people living with HIV and other key populations, treatment activists formed to organize an alternative international community-led event, in a setting safer for communities living with and affected by HIV/AIDS.
HIV 2020 will be a community-led, -driven, and –organized event focusing on communities roles and needs in the HIV response. The conference will address themes and topics including community-led responses in HIV – the lack of funding and shrinking space for civil society; major barriers to service delivery and accessing comprehensive prevention, treatment and care services, including SRHR services; the criminalization of and discrimination against people living with HIV and other key populations.
On this World AIDS Day, AIDS Action Europe salutes the communities that have been at the core and the forefront of the HIV response since the very beginning. Without the tireless efforts of communities of people living with HIV/AIDS, gay men and other MSM, sex workers, drug users, migrants and other mobile populations, women and young people affected by HIV, the global HIV-response would not be remotely there where it is now.
Communities have advocated for and delivered prevention, treatment and care services all over the world and have fought for human-rights based approaches in all fields of the HIV-response, advancing social justice to marginalized and vulnerable individuals and communities, often in hostile legal and social environments, facing judgement, stigma, discrimination and legal consequences for their efforts.
Recognizing the role that communities have played in the HIV response and the need for communities to reclaim the global HIV response, the AIDS Action Europe Steering Committee unanimously decided to stand behind the organizers and support HIV 2020.
The registration for HIV2020 is opened. More information about the conference you can find on the website: https://www.hiv2020.org
