(Originally published on 07/10/2015)

UNDP China today concluded a workshop on strengthening legal aid and access to justice for people living with and most affected by HIV. The three-day workshop brought together representatives from a number of organizations for people living with HIV and vulnerable populations including sex workers, sexual minorities and people who use drugs. Representatives from the Kunming Center for Disease Control HIV/AIDS Department, the Kunming Health and Education Institute, the Yunnan Institute of Drug Abuse and Kunming Medical School also attended the workshop.

The workshop is part of UNDP’s longstanding commitment to support the scale-up of HIV-related legal services in China. As part of this commitment, over the last 3 years UNDP China has worked with the Daytop Drug Abuse and Rehabilitation Center, an officially registered NGO in Kunming, Yunnan Province. UNDP initially supported Daytop to open a legal aid center for people living with HIV, but in recent years the organization has become a model for community-based legal aid services for marginalized groups, and partnered with 5 local community organizations in Kunming to expand their services to other populations in need.

The workshop in Kunming aimed to learn from Daytop’s longstanding local experience and take it to scale, by engaging a number of other organizations from across China. Participants explored the work carried out by Daytop over the last few years, which has shown that HIV-related legal services can contribute to building an enabling environment for effective HIV programmes. Strengthening these services enables people who are socially marginalized to have access to the justice system to deal with threats to their basic rights such as employment, education, healthcare and the right to confidentiality. The workshop also focused on the particular, central role that community-based legal aid services can play in responding to HIV-related discrimination in China.

In addition, participants received training on using new media to reach target populations as well as basic training on legal-aid service provision.

As a concrete output of the workshop, specific action plans for organizations working in different communities were designed based on research conducted in advance of the workshop, and all of these organizations will receive further training and support to enable them to provide legal services and consultations to people living with HIV from September. A national meeting on HIV-sensitive legal aid will be organized in Beijing in December to evaluate the progress on the programme and identify further capacity building needs.