Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic, and 10 years since the landmark UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS, the international community will come together to review progress and chart the future course of the global AIDS response at the 2011 UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AIDS from 8–10 June 2011 in New York.
Member States, including Spain, should adopt a new Declaration reaffirming the commitments made so far and a set of actions that help to guide and sustain the global response to AIDS in the near future. However, it seems that the international community and especially the European Union are unwilling to set either specific goals nor clear objectives of treatment coverage, although it has been proved their efficacy as well as the General Secretary himself, Ban Ki-Moon, has called on donors to support the establishment of a new global goal of access to treatment: 13 million people by 2015.
The absence of a cure, expandability, stigma and discrimination associated, the absence of a preventive vaccine and the fact that the treatment is for life, together with the high cost of new drugs and the external dependency to afford the treatments in many poor countries, give the HIV/AIDS an exceptional nature to further expand the achievements so far and be able to meet the challenges that in the short and long term poses the pandemic. The new data collected by UNAIDS shows clearly that very important continuous improvements are being achieved, which will allow, among other things, ending by 2015 with the vertical transmission of HIV from mother to child. However and despite the increase in overall funding available has been key to the great results achieved, however, global resources to combat the epidemic have been frozen and donors refuse to commit to mobilize the needed additional resources and without them, it will be impossible to achieve the objectives.
Tenemos SIDA, the network coordinated by Salud por Derecho, takes part of the Spanish delegation attending the High Level meeting in Nueva York as representative of civil society. In order to feed the Spanish position there, Tenemos SIDA has produced a document with recommendations that Spain should hopefully line up with the main requests that also rest of the international civil society, and different political parties at the European Parliament have demanded to the international community and to the European Union.
