Everyone in New York from civil society agrees that the latest version of the Political Declaration - the document which will be issued at the conclusion of the High Level Meeting - is very disappointing.
Chief among our concerns is the almost complete absence from the document of the commitment to achieve universal access. The relationship between reviewing progress in implementing the 2001 Declaration of Commitment and considering how to achive universal access has been and remains very unclear.
This meeting was agreed in 2001 for the purposes of undertaking a mid-term review of actions aimed at fulfilling the commitments made in 2001. The G8 and World Summit commitments to universal access and the work of the Global Steering Committee on the same issue were included in the agenda more recently but not with a clear sense of what all this was going to mean for the meeting as a whole. As a result there is a general sense of confusion about what it is that we should be looking to have achieved by Friday.
From the Alliance's point of view there are numerous ways in which the Political Declaration could be improved but given the time constraints we are focussing on one. This involves getting a stronger mention of the universal access process into the document, together with a commitment to develop an implementation plan for achieving universal access, including agreement on international and national targets.
Our proposal is to insert two new paragraphs into the document as follows:
- Welcome the 2005 World Summit Commitment to a massive scaling up of HIV prevention, treatment and care with the aim of coming as close as possible to the goal of universal access by 2010;
- Acknowledge, the Secretary General’s Note ‘Scaling up HIV prevention, treatment, care and support’ which identifies common obstacles to scaling up and makes recommendations for addressing such obstacles for accelerated and expanded action;
And to amend paragraph 43 by including the italicised text below:
- 43. Commit to set in 2006, through an inclusive process, an internationally agreed plan with international and national targets reflecting the urgent need to scale up significantly HIV prevention, treatment, care and support with the aim of achieving the goal of universal access to prevention, treatment care and support by 2010, as well as to set and maintain sound and rigorous monitoring and evaluation frameworks;
We believe that this would allows us to do more detailed work in implementing the universal access committment following the High Level Meeting.
Comments