With only 2 years until the G8’s 2010 target for universal access the deadline for weakly reiterating half-hearted old promises has well and truly expired, but leaders at this week’s G8 summit in Japan didn’t even really manage that.

The summit confirmed Stop AIDS campaigners’ fears by failing to take any concrete steps to deliver their promises, and even completely failed to mention some of their previous pledges; last year’s commitments to contribute to the $1.5 billion required for prevention of mother to child transmission services by 2010 and the $1.5 billion needed for maternal and child health care and voluntary family planning vanished from sight.

The 2007 G8 summit’s vague declaration to spend $60 billion fighting HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and strengthening health systems ‘over the coming years’ has been watered down during this year’s meeting in Toyako, Japan. The money, which will now be spent over the next 5 years rather than by 2010, falls $116 billion short of UNAIDS and WHO estimated resource needs.

Discontent amongst a coalition of HIV/AIDS & health organizations is also rife as the G8 made a hypocritical restatement of the 2005 commitment to reach universal access to HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care by 2010. Whilst this re-commitment is welcome, the G8 completely failed to recognise the necessity to quadruple HIV/AIDS resource expenditures in order to achieve it. Additional disappointment met the G8’s vague promise to ‘work towards’ reaching the WHO threshold of 2.3 professional health workers per 1000 people because it wasn’t backed up with adequate funding.

The pledge to ‘review’ HIV travel restrictions particularly in Russia and the US has also been seen as completely undermining original promises to eliminate them altogether and disgustingly allows for violations on the human rights of HIV positive persons.

Stop AIDS campaigners are justified in feeling betrayed by the G8’s failure to deliver any details over a monitoring mechanism and a lack of timetables for delivery. The $60 billion pledge over the next 5 years to tackle the combination of HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB & health systems is an embarrassment in comparison to the $65 billion necessary for fighting HIV/AIDS alone over the next 3 years. This shortfall will only lead to future costs, not only in human life but also in global expenditure – treating another generation betrayed by our leaders’ broken promises.

The most powerful again cynically failed to keep their word to the most vulnerable; a failure that is costing thousands of lives every day. However, the fight will go on, and we must all demand that these commitments are readdressed at the UN high level meeting on the Millennium Development Goals which takes place this September.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.