U.S. HIV border ban lifted

by Rex Wockner

New policies that removed the United States’ 22-year-old ban on HIV-positive immigrants and foreign visitors took effect Jan. 4.

Three days later, HIV-positive Dutchman Clemens Ruland and his partner Hugo Bausch arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport and were met by a representative of Human Rights Watch and the Dutch Embassy’s cultural attaché.

“Travel restrictions on HIV-positive people fundamentally affect their human dignity,” said Boris Dittrich from HRW’s LGBT Rights Program. “Lifting the HIV travel ban was a victory for human rights.”

Bausch won the trip for himself and Ruland in a Dutch AIDS Foundation contest to celebrate the ban’s demise.

In announcing the change last October, President Barack Obama said: “We talk about reducing the stigma of this disease, yet we’ve treated a visitor living with it as a threat. We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the AIDS pandemic, yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people with HIV from entering our own country. If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it.”

In a joint statement at the time, the Global Network of People Living With HIV, the European AIDS Treatment Group and Germany’s Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe “congratulate[d] the United States government on fulfilling its promise and completing the legal procedure that was started by former President Bush on World AIDS Day 2007.”

“This is a great victory for the fight against the worldwide discrimination of people living with HIV,” said AIDS-Hilfe’s Peter Wiessner. “I remember times where we never thought that this would happen. This is an emotional moment and it feels a bit like the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

EATG’s David Haerry called the ban’s demise “groundbreaking” and said it sends “a strong message to other countries maintaining stigmatizing restrictions today, such as Russia, China, Australia and Canada.”

The groups’ statement said that more than 60 nations, including some in Europe, have “stigmatizing entry or residency restrictions” and that “27 countries deport people on the grounds of having an HIV infection.”

The three organizations said they hope the U.S. government will take one final step in relegating the ban to the dustbin of history: “Erase all information with regards to the HIV status of people from its immigration databases.”