People diagnosed with HIV and AIDS often become the victims of stigma and discrimination. While it is a violation of a person's human rights to deny them access to goods, services and opportunities based on their HIV or AIDS status, many people are still held back by discrimination. That is why the Central American Network of People With HIV has launched a new virtual platform for people to report these human rights violations and receive legal advice on how to move forward. We spoke to REDCA's focal point in Belize, Diego Grajalez, about the new service...
Diego Grajalez
"We did the launch of the human rights violation reporting platform for persons living with HIV which is essentially to target human rights violations and actually dealing with the cases."
Alex Courtenay, 7News
"Talk to us a little bit about how people go about accessing the platform."
Diego Grajalez
"The platform is online at www.redca.org. As you enter, just do a denunciation and then when you click that a form appears. It has in two languages Spanish and English for Spanish and English speakers. From there the form goes with all basic questions, name, ID number, a description box where you put the complaint and if there were any witnesses. It is a secured system where once you save that data it will secure confidentiality. There we have a legal advisor in our regional office which then gets the case and starts to work on it immediately. It is very important because it starts to target the issue of stigma and discrimination. For example, if there is a person that probably got fired from their work because of their HIV status, then you have someone to advise you legally how to go around that. If you were negated access to school for being HIV positive you have a space where you can do that and someone who can actually help you with this process. This actually didn't come about just like that. This came through consultations that were done for the creation of the concept note of redca. Last year the concept note through the global fund was approved and redca created this platform. The way this platform works is many people don't know what is a human right violation but the focus of the project is to empower people about what is human rights violation and then you have this platform where you can actually access that to provide legal services in case of your human rights being violated. In Belize, based on our consultations with the persons dealing with HIV, they don't have a culture of denunciating any human rights violations that may be done to them."
Grajalez told us the the necessity for resources like this one is important because most cases of HIV and AIDS discrimination in Belize go unreported.
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