AIDS 2006 Conference - my boss speaks

CBS News 14 August 2006

For one front-line worker, the fight against AIDS and HIV involves battling more than the disease itself, and that workers and others face arrests and other roadblocks.

Sunil Babu Pant of Nepal a speaker at the international AIDS Conference in Toronto on Monday says human rights violations and discrimination have made his job with the Blue Diamond Society, a sexual health, HIV/AIDS, advocacy agency representing sexual minorities, much more difficult.

“We have a lot of transgendered people and men who have sex with men who have been denied health care,” he said during a panel session on human rights. “No hospitals will take them, no ambulance will carry them.”

Pant says he and other workers have had to carry the bodies of those who died from AIDS to the cremation centre themselves. Once they get to their destination, he says, more complications await.

“Either they charge a lot of money, or we are pushed [to another cremation centre] farther away,” he said. “There is no place for transgendered people or those who are HIV positive.”

Pant, a gay man himself, founded the Blue Diamond Society in 2001. The stigma around gay and transgendered people and HIV and AIDS was so prevalent that when the Blue Diamond Society first registered as a human rights organization it was not allowed to make reference to its specific clientele, he says. He adds that his clients and co-workers have been detained for as long as two weeks by Nepalese police, often without charge.

“Over the last three years, 150 [clients and front-line workers] have been arrested, and more are unreported.” The problem prompted the Joint United Nations program on HI V/AIDS to issue a statement expressing its concern to the government of Nepal in 2004.

A ban threatened

The Nepalese Supreme Court has also threatened to ban the Blue Diamond Society, Pant says.

The potential harassment ends up pushing people with HIV and AIDS underground, he says. Those who need medical care don’t come forward until the last, critical stages of the disease.

“I tend to get discouraged and frustrated,” says Pant. “But that doesn’t help our fight.” What has helped their fight, he says, is the Elton John Foundation, which donated an ambulance, and other funding which has enabled them to establish a hospice for HIV and AIDS patients.

Pant is optimistic that the mistreatment of sexual minorities and those with HIV and AIDS “has to end.” He says Nepal is in political transition from a monarchy to a newly reconstructed parliament and the Blue Diamond Society is involved with a movement towards protecting gay, transgendered and those infected with HIV and AIDS. The group is lobbying to include language in the legislation to do that.

“I want to be who I am, and I want to live,” he says. “It’s my own fight.”