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Should we use the criminal law to punish HIV transmission?1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Udo Schüklenk
Udo Schüklenk*
Affiliation:
Queen’s UniversityDepartment of Philosophy, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
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Extract

Legislators around the world are grappling with the question of whether or not the criminal law should be deployed in order to punish HIV transmission that is the result of voluntary sexual encounters between competent, consenting adults. A few years ago, when I was working in South Africa, that country’s Law Reform Commission proposed to declare HIV transmissions that are the result of voluntary sexual encounters among competent consenting adults a criminal offence that ought to fall under the category of rape (Schüklenk, 2003). Rape and voluntariness do not go too well together, so – not being a lawyer – I was surprised about the seemingly otherworldly machinations of legal minds in the context of HIV/AIDS. Matthew Weait points out in his book Intimacy and Responsibility: The Criminalisation of HIV Transmission that many liberal democracies have made HIV transmission a criminal offence, among these Canada, Sweden, Germany, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK and many others. In most countries, HIV infected people who demonstrably knew about their infection have been successfully prosecuted for transmitting HIV to their sexual partners.

Type
Review essay
Information
International Journal of Law in Context , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 277 - 284
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

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