23 May 2008: UNICEF in the Russian Federation helps to protect HIV-affected children’s rights
Every day 22 children are born to HIV-positive parents in the Russian Federation. Over 58,000 children, adolescents and young people under 20 live with HIV. Until very recently, only few of them have benefited from cash transfers and other social subsidies provided by the State. The director of the State Pension Fund from the small town of Yuzhnouralsk in central Russia, and the heads of the Fund’s affiliates from dozens of other Russian cities and towns believed that child allowance certificates should be marked with “HIV-infected minor” to provide a reason for being eligible for the child allowance. This meant that many of those parents who applied for benefits for their HIV positive children faced the harsh necessity of disclosing the child’s and eventually their own HIV-positive status to an official. “How will the cashier at the booking office look at me when I show her the certificate to get a free railway ticket for my child to go to St.Petersburg’s Children’s AIDS Clinic?” wonders the mother of a two-year-old boy from Yuzhnouralsk. The fear of being condemned and mistreated holds many parents back from using this child allowance certificate with a stigmatizing reference to HIV. To stop this practice of issuing wrongly completed certificates, UNICEF requested Aleksey Golovan, the Moscow City Child’s Rights Ombudsman and the Chairperson of the Russian Child’s Rights Ombudsmen Association to raise the issue with the Office of the Prosecutor General. Soon after the Obmbudsman’s inquiry, the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation sent out a letter to all 89 regional prosecutors with a request to ensure that the rights of HIV-positive children are not violated and that confidentiality of their HIV-positive status is respected by all officials including those who issue the allowance certificates. There is still a long way to go to combat stigmatization and discrimination against HIV-positive children and adults. This little “victory” is an important step. The next step will be made this autumn when the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, with UNICEF support, prepares and issues a policy paper on prevention of discrimination against HIV-positive children in educational setting. “Schools and kindergartens will accept all the children and not reject those who live with HIV,” said Andrey Gerish, an official from the Ministry of Education, at a community dialogue session of the Second Eastern European and Central Asian Conference on AIDS held in Moscow in early May.
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