Backgrounder on the G8/G20 & Universal Access

Posted: Wednesday, 7 April 2010

Information Backgrounder

From March 21-27 2010, trade unions and civil society organizations throughout the world will target Canadian Embassies in their countries. The campaign is launched in an effort to put pressure on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to lead the G8 in producing a concrete plan to achieve Universal Access to HIV & AIDS Prevention, Treatment, Care and Support at the upcoming G8 and G20 Summit Meetings in Ontario, Canada.

As leader of the host country, Prime Minister Harper will preside over the G8 Summit in Huntsville, June 25-26 and co-host the G20 Summit with South Korea in Toronto, June 26-27. He will be well positioned to shape the agendas of both Summits and, in particular, to reinvigorate the G8’s past promises on HIV and AIDS.

The African Regional Organization of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC-Africa) and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) have issued a call on universal access, twinning embassy actions in Africa with an internal lobby in Canada1. The Global Union AIDS Programme (GUAP) and the Global ITUC have also called on their respective members to engage in similar embassy actions in their own countries to broaden the scope of the campaign beyond Africa.

All lobbying will take place as part of a Week of Action (March 21-27, 2010) immediately in advance of the G8 Foreign Ministers’ meeting scheduled for March 29-30, 2010 in Ottawa, Canada.

The embassy lobby outside Canada

Our lobby targets Canadian Embassies or Consulates, and highlights the G8’s failure to fulfill its promise to achieve universal access to HIV and AIDS services by 2010. It demands a concrete, time-bound plan of action to ensure delivery. It also urges the G20 to ensure that economic recovery strategies recognize the financial consequences of the global HIV and AIDS pandemic and their connection to poverty and other development issues like education, gender, food security, water and climate change.

Unions insist that universal access goals are critical to social and economic stability as the vast majority of people living with HIV and AIDS are of working age (15 – 50 years). As such, HIV and AIDS is a workplace issue; it affects workers and their families, the enterprises and agencies they work for, and the delivery of public services that depend on them (see Appendix A for more information on the trade unions concern about HIV and AIDS).

Globally, nearly 33.4 million people are currently living with HIV. In 2008, 2.7 million people were newly-infected with HIV, and AIDS-related illnesses claimed the lives of over 2 million people; among the most heavily-affected regions are sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Despite the fact that rates of infection are beginning to stabilize in sub-Saharan Africa, it remains the most heavily-affected region, accounting for 67% of all people living with HIV and 72% of deaths due to AIDS2. The Caribbean is the second most affected region, with adult infection rates ranging from 1% to 11%. AIDS-related illnesses are the fourth or fifth leading cause of death for women and men, respectively3.

In Asia, rates of HIV infection are still comparatively low (less than 1%, with the exception of Thailand) but rising. Moreover, the sheer size of the country populations and absolute numbers of infected people translates into 6 million households that will fall victim to poverty by 20154.