AIDS fight blocked by religion

Religion is hindering United Nations efforts to spread the messages needed to combat the spread of AIDS, human rights activist and High Court judge Michael Kirby said on Thursday.

Australia, under successive governments, had been far more successful in its approach to the disease, he said.

Justice Kirby was launching a new book, Civil Society, Religion and Global Governance, which includes contributions by a range of international and Australian political, legal, economic and religious figures on the role of civil society.
"We have in the world to spread the messages that are essential to stopping the spread of the (AIDS) virus," Justice Kirby said.

"Unfortunately, the only way you can do that in the absence of a drug that will do it, or the vaccine that will do it, is by the sort of measures that we have taken in Australia, that we took bravely under successive governments - the Labor government and the present government - to deal with the way in which the virus spreads.

"The difficulty that the world faces is that the United Nations seems substantially disempowered to spread those messages because of the religious impediments that exist to spreading the messages that are essential."

Those messages included the availability of condoms and the role of safer sex, the reduction of the risks of intravenous drug use, the availability of clean needles, the decriminalisation of commercial sex work and the decriminalisation of homosexual acts, Justice Kirby said.

He said these and other messages were very difficult to transmit in many countries because of the attitudes of religion.

"We have to discuss it because it affects us all and it's essential that we do it for the good of humanity," he said.

The United Nations body UNAIDS said that 39.5 million people were living with HIV/AIDS in 2006.