Private: USAID Policy Hinders AIDS Relief

At the end of September, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Agency for International Development. The suit challenges the requirement that funding recipients must pledge their "opposition to prostitution" in order to continue their life-saving HIV prevention work.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of George Soros's Open Society Institute. "The United States has made a historic and laudable commitment to combat HIV/AIDS. But these funding restrictions threaten to render these achievements ineffective. More than 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS and five million became infected in 2004," the Institute said in a press release. Moreover,

The USAID pledge requirement undermines efforts to provide life-saving services and information to sex workers, who are at significant risk of infection and can also transmit HIV to others. In many countries, the epidemic is concentrated among sex workers and reaching them with prevention services will help avert a wider epidemic.

Last week, in New York University's student newspaper, coumnist Lucas Keturi published an op/ed on the disputed policy. He wrote:

The anti-prostitution pledge, buried in the Global AIDS Act of 2003, is characteristic of the Bush administration's approach to any issue broaching the subject of human sexuality, be it sex education, abortion rights or same-sex marriage: intolerant, unrealistic and religiously-charged denunciations of the existence of a sexuality outside of the bounds of marriage, and a feigned innocence in creating conditions that make acts of sexual victimization possible.

USAID's sanctimonious moralizing and economic subjugation of the global south compliment each other in a perverse way. By condemning individual prostitutes, they can conveniently avoid the topic of the crippling poverty that leads so many into prostitution - poverty which, incidentally, is exacerbated by the very policies so vehemently promoted by USAID.