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GUEST: Darby Hickey, FSRN correspondent, Joe Amon, Director of the HIV/AIDS program at Human Rights Watch

This week, an estimated 20,000 government officials, scientists and activists from all over the world are gathered in Toronto, Canada for the 16th International AIDS Conference, the world’s biggest AIDS conference. The conference is a follow up to a high-level meeting on the AIDS virus that was held at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in late May. In the declaration signed by U.N. member states on June 2nd, governments promised to work towards universal access to comprehensive prevention and treatment programs by 2010 and also pledged to set arduous national targets for tracking the progress of their efforts. Government delegates attending the Toronto conference are being asked to show how their countries have taken action on the promises made at the U.N. high-level meeting. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the first reported cases of HIV. Nearly 65 million people across the globe have been infected with the virus since then and AIDS has killed more than 25 million people.

Darby Hickey’s reports can be found at www.fsrn.org.

Human Rights Watch has a new report entitled, “Compromised Intentions
The 2006 U.N. High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS and Its Failure to Address the Human Rights Abuses Fueling the Pandemic.”

Visit Human Rights Watch at www.hrw.org.