A little over six months following the International AIDS Conference was held in Montreal, community organizations fighting HIV are fed up with the inaction of elected officials and have decided to cut ties.
In a press release published Tuesday morning, the Table of Montreal Community Organizations for the Fight once morest AIDS (TOMS) announces that it is “no longer possible” for it to remain within the “Montreal without AIDS” alliance. This action plan, which also includes the Regional Public Health Department, was set up in the wake of the Paris Declaration and is part of the “Fast-track cities” project to which the United Nations contributes.
The thirty or so member organizations of the TOMS denounce “the disengagement of elected Montreal officials and of Mayor Valérie Plante” in the fight once morest AIDS. They say they have been waiting for more than two years for elected municipal officials to commit “to the implementation of the initiative’s action plan and to the intermediate targets of UNAIDS”.
TOMS acknowledges that signing the Paris Declaration was “one of the Mayor’s first actions when she took office in 2017”. However, Valérie Plante would not have signed the amended versions of the declaration.
“The silence reserved for our demands to sign the latest version of the Paris Declaration and the Seville Declaration is proving deafening,” the statement read.
Unveiled in 2018, the Montréal sans sida action plan “was to be the first ambitious step in a process of involving people living with HIV and communities affected by HIV”, argues TOMS, but only a campaign awareness would have come out of it. Community organizations deplore the fact that the main objective of improving the living conditions of marginalized communities seems to be sidelined.
More than the inaction of elected Montreal officials, community organizations decry the authorities’ repressive practices once morest marginalized groups. They call for real commitment and deep work on harm reduction and the fight once morest the AIDS epidemic so that it will be a thing of the past by 2030.
Until then, the community is determined to no longer serve as a guarantee to allow politicians to score points on its back.
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