8 - Legal Barriers to Accessing Vital Medical Services and Creative Responses to Overcoming These

Summary

This chapter provides a case study of how the rule of law was temporarily strengthened in one subbranch of health and medical law. The authors are doctors who ensured wider access to HIV/AIDS services to three key populations by setting up primary healthcare clinics for drug users, men who have sex with men, and sex workers. Providing services is challenging as the latter two groups are engaged in behavior considered criminal, and their very existence is officially denied. Sex between men and adultery can be punishable by death. The doctors’ harm-reduction approach was gradually expanded province- and nation-wide during Khatami’s presidency (1997-2005), allowing even for methadone treatment and needle exchanges. Under President Ahmadinejad, the government returned to the revolutionary “war on drugs” and policing approach, closing the triangular clinics and forcing the authors into exile. The chapter illustrates how legal challenges intertwine with cultural, religious, and political responses to Iran’s HIV/AIDS pandemic.