Sign on: Civil Society Letter to Countries that Impose Travel Restrictions

Travel Restrictions

Sign on: Civil Society Letter to Countries that Impose Travel Restrictions

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when AIDS was still a little-understood disease, governments often took actions that were not beneficial to the health crisis in general, nor the people affected by it. One of these initiatives - travel restrictions were put into place to slow or altogether stop people living with HIV from traveling into countries with the restrictions. Over 20 year after the restrictions were originally implemented, many countries have eliminated these inappropriate restrictions after a broad consensus from the public health community agreed about their ineffectiveness and discriminatory nature. In spite of this, 74 countries still have some form of HIV specific travel restrictions, and 12 countries ban HIV positive people from entering the country for any reason or length of time.

Travel restrictions are important to universal access for many reasons. Beyond the violations of their basic human rights, people living with HIV who are restricted from traveling are not afforded the same rights of universal access to treatment, care and support. Further, due to the advances of universal access, the costs related to treatment can no longer be an argument for restricting those traveling.

Within this section you will find the latest information about the campaign to eliminate travel restrictions.

What are travel restrictions?

Impacts of the Travel Restrictions

Why do governments continue to restrict travel?

What is being done to stop these restrictions?

Restricted from travel: Personal accounts

Sign on: Civil Society Letter to Countries that Impose Travel Restrictions

We invite you, in advance of the UN high-level Meeting on AIDS in New York from 10-11 June, to sign on to a letter to the UN missions and Heads of State of countries that impose travel restrictions on people living with HIV.

As members of civil society we condemn such restrictions as discriminatory and in contradiction to the commitments made through the 2001 Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS and the 2006 Political Declaration. We urge governments that continue to impose travel restriction on people living with HIV to lift these, whether short or long-term.

To sign on to the letter, please send the name of your organisation and country to universalaccess2010@icaso.orgThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it before 5 June. ICASO will also be collecting signatures during the civil-society pre-meeting taking place the day before (9 June) of the high-level meeting in New York.

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