Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-11-19-Speech-3-391"
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"en.20081119.25.3-391"2
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"Madam President, I wish to congratulate the French Presidency for its commitment to the fight against AIDS and HIV, and also congratulate those who have spoken in the debate this evening.
It is a late-night debate on an issue that actually affects every single one of us every single minute of every single day. As a gay man living in the 1970s and 1980s, I could so easily have contracted the HIV virus. I was lucky. I did not. However, I watched as swathes of generations were cut down by a virus and cut down by discrimination and stigmatisation.
That is why the message we need to send tonight is that we are committed to making available treatment and to having early testing but, above and beyond all that, and the brilliant and excellent work Mr Bowis did as a Health Minister in a Conservative government, we have to say that what happens to you is as if it happens to me, or my daughter or my son. People do not go for early testing for one simple reason: fear of the discrimination that they will have to live with – that stigmatisation.
I remember once in the early 1980s visiting a hospital to try and cheer up the patients – which I always failed to do! – and walking into an HIV unit to find that in one of the beds was one of my close friends. He could not even tell me that he was living and dying with an AIDS-related illness. That situation still exists, not only in our countries, but also on other continents. What happens on other continents affects us directly because, unless we engage with the communities most at risk, they will never hear the message. A sex worker who gets trafficked into the EU is as vulnerable as a visitor from the EU to Africa or one of the other continents. That is why I welcome this resolution. 1 December 2008 is the 20
anniversary of International AIDS Day, but little changes except the lives that accumulate, that go past and are destroyed. That is why I congratulate the House, the Presidency and the Commission, and all of the speakers, for being here to send a signal that what happens to them happens to us."@en1
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