Grant: Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: Knowledge Translation

The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network proposes to hold a one-and-a-half day educational symposium on HIV/AIDS, law and human rights that will engage multiple audiences. The aim of the symposium is to stimulate new learning and knowledge exchange between researchers, policy-makers, service providers, people living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs), legal professionals and ASOs/CBOs. The symposium will open on the evening of Friday, June 12th, 2009 with a keynote address by the Hon. Justice Edwin Cameron, a judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and an internationally-renowned human rights advocate openly living with HIV. Over the course of the following day, four panel discussions and three skills-building workshops will bring together lawyers, judges, health researchers, ASOs/CBOs and PHAs to discuss and debate, from various perspectives, key legal developments related to HIV and relevant research, and their implications for policy and practice in four different areas: global access to AIDS medicines and Canada's Access to Medicines regime; drug policy developments and the impact on HIV prevention and care among people who use drugs; prisoner's rights to information and services for HIV prevention and care; the criminalization of HIV transmission/exposure. All of these issues are ones on which there is a need for greater exchange between researchers, lawyers and policy-makers in order to advance policy that is evidence-based and human rights-based.