"An Affront To Our Common Humanity"

The Senate will vote soon on whether to remove the U.S.'s ban on all travel and immigration for people with HIV. The UN is today calling for change:

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the opening of the U.N. 2008 High Level Meeting on AIDS on Tuesday called on the international community to end discrimination against HIV-positive people, including travel restrictions, describing such practices as "an affront to our common humanity," Xinhuanet reports. Ban also said that such discrimination "drives the virus underground, where it can spread in the dark; as important, it is an affront to our common humanity". Ban said that 60 years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "it is shocking that there should still be discrimination against those at high risk, such as men who have sex with men, or stigma attached to individuals living with HIV."

Only twelve countries on the planet have policies that openly discriminate against the HIV-positive: Armenia, Colombia, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Solomon Islands, South Korea, Sudan, Yemen ... and the US. And yet there is some resistance in the Senate to joining the civilized world and removing the Jesse Helms legacy.