China bans AIDS rights meeting, group says

China has banned AIDS activists from holding a meeting on the rights of people with the disease, one of the organisers said on Sunday, citing official fears over foreign involvement in the sensitive subject. The conference would have brought together 50 Chinese and foreign experts and activists to discuss how to press the legal rights of people with HIV/AIDS.

But government authorities told the New York-based Asia Catalyst group to cancel the meeting planned for early August in Guangzhou near Hong Kong in the south, said Sara Davis, one of the organisers. "Authorities informed us that the combination of AIDS, law and foreigners was too sensitive," Davis told Reuters. There were no plans to reschedule the meeting, she said.

Phone calls to government spokesmen in Guangzhou and Beijing were not answered on Sunday. China has become increasingly open about AIDS in recent years, facing up to an epidemic once stigmatized as a disease of the West.

The nation had 203,527 officially registered cases of HIV/AIDS by the end of April, up from 183,733 at the end of October 2006. Of the latest figure, 52,480 had progressed to full-blown AIDS.

But the United Nations estimates the true number of HIV/AIDS cases in the country to be around 650,000.

Nowadays, Beijing backs campaigns to educate citizens on avoiding infection, and victims infected through reckless commercial blood collection in rural Henan province have been given free medicines.

But officials in the one-party state remain wary of local activists and foreign groups pressing legal claims of infected citizens or raising official complicity in the spread of the disease. Henan has informally blocked patients from suing officials over tainted blood.

The meeting co-organized with China Orchid AIDS Project, a Beijing-based group, had invited several experts from South Africa, India, the United States, Canada and Thailand.

Planned topics included discrimination, blood safety and setting up a legal aid center for people with HIV/AIDS.

"Protecting legal rights is key to any successful fight against AIDS," said Davis in an emailed statement about the cancellation.

"China has passed laws protecting those rights, and people with AIDS need assistance in order to exercise them."

In May, China barred a prominent AIDS and environmental activist couple from leaving the country, accusing them of endangering national security.

Earlier in the year, Henan officials tried to stop Gao Yaojie -- a doctor who helped expose the rural AIDS epidemic there -- from going to Washington to collect a human rights award. They let her go after an international outcry.