Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very glad to be able to welcome you to this great, colourful, European Forum. There is a good reason why this Partnership Forum opens the Conference entitled “Responsibility and Partnership – Together Against HIV/AIDS”, as we are concerned to emphasise the significance of the partnership between the State and civil society, the partnership between the EU Member States and their neighbours, and the partnership between the healthy and the sick in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Ladies and Gentlemen, you represent people who live with HIV/AIDS. It was your idea to organise this “market of encounter”. You helped to plan the conference from the outset and input your suggestions – and you did so in a spirit of cooperation which led to synergies – even before the conference had begun. And this is something which I highly appreciate.
A market is always a meeting place, a place in which to exchange, buy, talk, see, observe and copy.
We would like to see this conference giving rise to such an interest, to such curiosity, to such an exchange, and perhaps even to see some models being adopted. We would like to set the stage for a dialogue, to set it in motion and to intensify it. This is why I asked my fellow ministers to include in their delegations representatives of non-governmental organisations and to involve them in designing the stands. And associations of people who are affected by HIV/AIDS are indispensable partners in developing and implementing activities to prevent HIV/AIDS.
When one is dealing with an infectious disease which already affects a total of 40 million people worldwide, and which infects more than four million more every year, governments are first and foremost called on to protect their populations and to offer support and treatment to those who are affected. Many governments have faced this responsibility, and have established strategies. As we will soon see when we take a look around, the strategies have a great deal in common, but there is also considerable diversity. The development of a strategy to combat HIV/AIDS is a success in its own right.
We all know the hurdles which are to be taken in implementation, and we can only overcome them by working together with the victims and in collaboration with the civil society.
Because as yet we are unable to heal AIDS, we have to focus our efforts on preventing infection. We know how this can be achieved, and this has been better researched than in the case of many other diseases. We simply have to apply the recipes of prevention …
Since HIV/AIDS infection can be avoided by acting in a responsible manner, everyone must be made aware of how it is transmitted. Even if it is not always easy to talk about topics such as sex and drugs, it is necessary to speak in language which is clear and comprehensible, and which is culturally acceptable.
We in Germany have now had the “Don’t give AIDS a chance” campaign for twenty years, which embraces this very approach. The important thing was always to present the message of “Sex yes - HIV/AIDS no” in such a way as to reach as many people as possible without pointing a moral finger. One successful method is to break down taboos using humour, and we need input on this from communication experts in every country who know, or who can find out by their research, what works and what does not.
At the same time, there is a need to reach particularly high-risk groups. Cooperation with civil society groups in a spirit of partnership has proven to be the best way to do so. Organisations which are active in the fight against AIDS have access for instance to drug users and prison inmates. They use their Internet platforms to fight the trend towards against making HIV/AIDS seem harmless. I would like at this point to thank the “Deutsche AIDS-Hilfe” assistance organisation, who carry out this target group-specific information and advisory work through their regional associations. Trust has been built up over years of collaboration, laying a foundation for prevention in Germany which works by sharing tasks. Particularly when it comes to prevention which targets high-risk groups, the State needs stakeholders from the civil society to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.
The HIV virus does not stop at borders. High infection rates in one country always affect the neighbouring states too. It is therefore a common concern for all our countries to achieve successes in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
Europe has already done a lot, both worldwide and above all also in the Union itself, to enable the Member States to work together, this collaboration also incorporating our non-EU neighbours and non-governmental organisations. I am thinking about the Think Tank on HIV/AIDS which was established by the European Commission, to which all the EU Member States belong, and about the Civil Society Forum, which brings together non-governmental organisations, and about the campaign for the latest World AIDS Day, when a large flag was hung from the central European Commission building in Brussels bearing the motto “AIDS – forget me not.”
The European Union set up the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control – ECDC – in Stockholm last year. This centre plays a major role in collecting epidemiological data on HIV/AIDS. Such institutions also use their expertise in the fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic at European level in terms of their policy, media and medical work.
The transfer of knowledge is just as important as partnership. As our Forum continues today, the Commission can take on an important role here by helping the Member States to exchange knowledge and experience about the fight against HIV/AIDS. What is already there does not need to be re-invented and – in contradistinction to commercial markets – everything here is free today. You can take notes, you can copy, and it is actually of considerable importance that you should do so! I would like us to all leave Bremen with new ideas, new cooperation partners, and with the unambiguous commitment of those in government to tame this disease by applying our joint efforts.
