The G8 gives up on universal access to treatment for 2010: a criminal turnaround
Act Up-Paris Press Release: July 1 2008: According to the Financial Times the G8 is priming itself to go back on the commitments it pledged at the Glenneagles summit in 2005. Universal access to aids treatments will not longer be guaranteed by 2010, and the increase of 25 billion euros of aid for African development is no longer certain for 2015.
Disastrous Consequences for the fight against AIDS
70% of people living with AIDS today do not have access to the treatments that would save their lives. The price of medications, the under-funding of treatment access, the lack of resources to resolve the health professionals crisis in Africa: these are the plagues that the G8 took on in 2005, to finally and effectively combat the AIDS pandemic, which every day kills eight thousand people around the world. Indeed, the G8 had committed itself to universal access to treatment by 2010. To go back on these promises, to postpone these financial commitments, would be to admit and even to accept that those eight thousand people die daily—the majority in Southern countries. It would be humanely and politically unacceptable, and this possibility makes us deeply angry.
Sarkozy, Kouchner, Woerth and Joyandet: the primary culprits
Since the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as president of the Republic, France has not stopped going back on its commitments to health. Since December 2007, organizations have had to fight to ensure that the French contribution to the fight against AIDS is not reduced [2], where it is already completely insufficient (that is the work of Eric Woerth, Minister of the Budget). More recently, the Secretary of State for Cooperation officially devoted the new politics of development in France to cynicism and profitability [3]: if France is going to give to Africa, France must get something out of it—so the poor countries must give something to France. Such is the credo of the Sarkozy government.
Let’s be reminded that for a year now, France has given at least 14 billion euros to the most rich threw a new tax policy.
Call for International Mobilization
By abandoning their commitments for 2010, the leaders of the G8 once again betray those who are sick. This Wednesday, July 2, Act Up-Paris will make public the phone and fax numbers and email addresses of the people in charge at the Elysée, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Secretary of State for Cooperation. We invite every citizen and every organization—especially organizations representing the PLWA—in France, in Africa, and throughout the world to contact these offices and to demand that they hold to the promises they made at Glenneagles.