CAPACITY-BUILDING OF LEGAL SECTOR WORKERS
Toolkit: Scaling Up HIV-Related Legal Services
educational materials for law students, lawyers, prosecutors or judges. Partnerships between legal services can facilitate exchange of staff, mentoring and other professional development opportunities. National and regional conferences on HIV and/or legal services can be a way of bringing stakeholders together, to strengthen professional networks and share lessons in effective service delivery. Capacity-building networks are important for sharing knowledge, such as key judgements, capacity-building techniques and legal education and training resources. To offer effective services to people living with HIV, lawyers should have a good understanding of the nature of HIV and of its psychological, social and legal consequences. It is important to explore social attitudes (including lawyers’ attitudes) during any training programme. Attitudes that can be discussed as a part of training include attitudes towards people living with HIV, people who use illicit drugs, violence against women, sex workers, men who have sex with men, transgender people and prisoners. Addressing attitudes, including exploring prejudices and challenging assumptions and misconceptions about sexual orientation and gender identity, is often more important than explaining the relevant law in ensuring that people living with HIV receive quality legal services. It may be useful to include the following elements in training: 1 An introduction to the experience of living with HIV in the local community and the human rights issues faced in everyday life, presented by a person living with HIV. Testimony from people living with HIV about their experiences with the legal system is a very powerful way to challenge attitudes and convey the reality of living with HIV. This component should come before the other components–it is a mistake to jump to the substantive legal issues before the preliminary training on attitudes and the nature of the epidemic. 2 A description of the science of HIV, including means of transmission and prevention, locally available treatments, treatment side-effects and illness progression. 3 A description of the social context, including the local epidemiology, social drivers of the epidemic, key populations and gender factors. 4 An introduction to the human-rights-based approach to HIV and how protection of human rights underpins effective prevention, care, support and treatment, including commitments made by governments on human rights and law in the United Nations Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS (2001) and the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS (2006). Participatory learning approaches and experiential learning techniques are more likely to be effective than lecture-style classroom teaching methods. 33