Alongside the Sixth International Conference on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer hosted a regional meeting of his colleagues, focussed on HIV and AIDS, as had been called for at the previous ICAAP meeting.
There was also a meeting of First Ladies, who focussed on the needs of rural and island women and presented a report to the ministerial meeting.
While the ministerial meeting invitation had been sent to Finance Ministers, the majority of those who attended were in fact Health Ministers. Nonetheless, the meeting did focus on regional economic, poverty and security issues arising from the epidemic. Ministers from 33 countries across the region attended, along with representatives of some international funders (including the UK's Department for International Development) and of community networks. Mr Downer noted that HIV has the potential to destabilise entire nations and could not be ignored.
One outcome of the meeting was an agreement to set up an Asia Pacific Leadership Forum on HIV/AIDS to provide training and improve coordination of responses. Among the commitments for which people with HIV had lobbied is an undertaking by the Australian government to assist poorer countries in the region to draft patent laws to maximise access to treatments. Further Australian assistance would be given to regional programmes to reduce harm related to injecting drug use, to strengthen control of sexually transmitted diseases in Indonesia, and to reinforce or establish national HIV/AIDS programmes in a number of Pacific Island countries.
A Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting had been scheduled to take place in Brisbane, Australia, during October, although this was postponed to 2002 following the attack on the World Trade Center in New York. Work continues among interested organisations through the Para 55 group to keep HIV/AIDS high on the agenda for future Commonwealth meetings.
During ICAAP, several sessions and workshops were devoted to following up the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS held in June 2001. The International Council of AIDS Service Organizations has released an “Advocacy Guide to the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS” to help translate that Declaration into action.
The ICASO Guide explains the status of the Declaration and while noting that it did not go as far as ICASO would have wanted in naming vulnerable populations or endorsing specific UNAIDS guidelines on AIDS and human rights, says that it remains “a very strong statement” which “sets real targets for prevention, funding and accessing essential medicines, among other things”. It amounts to “the new benchmark against which we measure progress”.