- American aid agencies expressed concern yesterday over
new rules imposed by the Bush administration making funding for the fight
against Aids dependent on a pledge to combat prostitution.
-
- Charities seeking federal funding for anti-Aids programmes
abroad will have to sign a form expressing opposition to prostitution and
sex trafficking. They will also have to inform aid recipients of condom
failure rates.
-
- The conditions reflect a push by conservative Christian
groups for emphasis on sexual abstinence rather than precautions in the
Bush administration's anti-Aids campaign.
-
- They will affect the disbursement of $2.2bn (£1.3bn)
in grants and contracts from the US Agency for International Development
(USAid). No USAid officials were available for comment yesterday but Kent
Hill, the acting administrator for global health, told the Associated Press
that the pledge was a way for the United States to take a stand against
a life he called degrading and debilitating.
-
- "Prostitution is not a positive for the people who
are involved in it," he said. "The vast majority of people, globally,
do not find themselves there by choice."
-
- Several agencies fighting Aids have argued that the pledge
is counter-productive because it would stigmatise prostitutes and make
it more difficult to teach them how to protect themselves from infection.
-
- "Our position is that this doesn't address the root
causes," said Terri Bartlett, vice-president for public policy at
Population Action International, a research group that does not accept
federal money.
-
- "There are huge concerns and considerations that
it will harm the most difficult and the most important programmes."
-
- Catholic Relief Services, which approves of the anti-prostitution
message, is concerned about the administrative costs that a legal pledge
would entail.
-
- "We might be required to install a huge bureaucracy,
because we would have to verify that none of our partners are pro-prostitution,"
Michael Wiest, CRS's vice-president, said.
-
- "If we had to require the Archbishop of Ouagadougou
to sign a pledge against prostitution, that's hard to do. And we have 20,000
partners."
-
- Congress approved the pledge in 2003 and it was first
applied to foreign recipients of US aid, leading in May to Brazil's decision
not to accept $40m for its Aids programme.
-
- The justice department questioned whether the imposition
of such rules infringed US-based charities' constitutional right to freedom
of expression. But the department dropped its objections last year and
the rule has now gone into effect.
-
- Foreign family planning groups receiving US federal funds
are also banned from discussing the possibility of abortion with their
clients.
-
- The "global gag rule", as it is known to its
critics, originated under Ronald Reagan's administration. It was dropped
by Bill Clinton but then reinstated by George Bush immediately on taking
office in January 2001.
-
- * The Brazilian government was yesterday involved in
critical negotiations with a US drug company over lowering the price of
a crucial Aids medication.
-
- The health ministry had warned it would break the drug's
patent and start producing a cheaper, generic version of the anti-retroviral
Kaletra unless Abbott Laboratories sharply cut its price for the Brazilian
market by midnight on Thursday.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1524709,00.html
|
