July 31, 2019
UNAIDS has launched a new website that allows people to identify national laws and policies related to the AIDS response.
Covering areas as diverse as a country's capacity to diagnose HIV in young infants, the existence of laws that discriminate against transgender people, and whether people are prosecuted for carrying condoms, the Laws and Policies Analytics website aims to provide a comprehensive view of a country's laws and policies related to the HIV response. It also allows users to view policy data alongside other data on the HIV epidemic and the response.
“We need a better understanding of the legal and policy environments to generate effective responses to the HIV epidemic. This new tool will provide access to data on national laws and policies and enable joint analysis with data on the epidemic and the response, so that we can drive more informed decision-making,” said Shannon Hader, Deputy Executive Director of the UNAIDS Programme.
According to the 2016 United Nations Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS, countries committed to accelerating efforts to significantly increase the availability of high-quality HIV data. The information used on the new website was reported from 2017 and most recently in 2019 through the National Commitments and Policies Instrument (NCPI), part of the Global AIDS Monitoring mechanism through which countries report their progress on the commitments they made in the 2016 Declaration.
The data were provided by national authorities, civil society organizations, and other non-governmental partners involved in the AIDS response. Data on HIV-related laws and policies compiled from other external official documents complement the data provided at the national level. UNAIDS conducts thorough validation of all included policy data to ensure its accuracy. The data will be updated annually.
The website contains data from over 140 countries. Users can search by country or region using an interactive map or select a specific topic.
By making policy data widely available, UNAIDS seeks to promote transparency and greater use of policy data in analyses of the HIV epidemic and the HIV response in countries around the world.
From: https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2019/july/20190731_mapping-hiv-laws-and-policies