Confronting AIDS: Human Rights, Law, and Social Transformation

This piece developed out of discussions between the authors at the 12th World AIDS Conference, held in Geneva in 1998. In the sessions on human rights, a number of delegates from Asia and Africa experienced some difficulty understanding how they could apply the primarily legal arguments of the UN's HIV/AIDS and Human Rights: International Guidelines to local conditions.' Particularly visible was a confusion about the relevance of international law as well as the difficulty associated with downloading a paradigm of human rights located in a Western legal framework into non-Western societies. The piece asserts the enormous importance of human rights issues to HIV prevention and care. It looks fleetingly