Grant: CIHR Café Scientifique Program

The criminalization of non-disclosure may seem logical to many as it is the person's responsibility to disclose his or her HIV status. The HIV positive individual is privy to important information that affects the precise balance of risk inherent in unprotected sexual relations. Where non-disclosure is the result of deliberate, conscious deceit, criminal courts in Canada clearly favour harsher sentencing. However criminalization carries with it significant public health consequences: the risk of deterring individuals from seeking HIV testing by inducing fear of incarceration, an adverse effect on patient-provider relationships, a risk of lulling society into a false sense of protection by criminal law and the infringement of civil liberties. The fear of legal consequences may make individuals at risk less inclined to accept an offer of HIV testing, less inclined to seek the services of sexually transmitted infection clinics, and/or less inclined to discuss their HIV status with sexual and drug-injecting partners. In the criminal prosecution of HIV transmission/exposure there still remains the difficult issues of proof, knowledge, intent, and discriminatory application of the law. The definition of the requisite level of risk to secure conviction remains imprecise due to a wide variation in lower court decisions. The Canadian AIDS Society considers that the extent of responsibility can be mitigated by the degree of risk exposure(i.e. decresed level of responsibility when a comdom is used). We will have short presentations from experts and a question/answer period to critically examine the issues concerning the idea of antiretroviral therapy as HIV prevention, as it was recently shown that antiretrovirals decrease risk of transmission, and its potential role in changing HIV criminalization in the province of Quebec.