In our daily lives we know the difference: a doctor is not a judge, a nurse is not a policeman, a hospital is not a court of law. Yet imagine that you were seized by police, beaten, jailed, hauled to trial, facing a prison sentence, kept chained to a hospital bed - because police suspected you, not of a crime, but of carrying a virus. The story is a grim one. In October police stopped two men having an altercation on a street downtown. When one of them admitted that he was HIV-positive, police arrested them both. They were charged with the "habitual practice of debauchery, a law which has been used mercilessly many times in recent years to penalize men for homosexual conduct. But in this case police and prosecutors never produced any evidence of homosexual conduct. The only "evidence was that one man had acknowledged he was living with HIV. Police tortured the men to extract confessions, and started rounding up others -people whose photos or phone numbers they found with the arrested men. So far a dozen people have been seized and jailed. Four have already been sentenced to prison terms. Several of them are lying in hospital, where - on police orders - they are kept chained to their beds most of the day. All 12 were forced to submit to HIV tests. One says a prosecutor told him that he had tested positive by berating him: "People like you should be burnt alive. You do not deserve to live. Egypt has publicly promised to adhere to human rights standards, and to provide lifesaving information and care to people vulnerable to HIV/AIDS. These abuses show a blatant and brutal disregard for both. This witch-hunt by Egyptian police, though, threatens all of us. It reflects the dangerous moment when officials charged with protecting the public are themselves delirious with their own fever - fear. These officials' reckless and ruthless attitude, treating HIV as a crime, will drive those vulnerable to it as well as those already infected, underground. If people can be imprisoned when they test HIV-positive, who would dare seek out an HIV test voluntarily? If people can be beaten and abused simply for speaking about their HIV status, who would dare ask in public how to prevent infection? If people can be tortured because of fears and lies, who will dare to tell the truth? These abuses also reflect the long years when police and prosecutors have had the power to break the bodies of those who fell into their hands, without public scrutiny or fear of punishment. The abuses within the criminal-justice system now endanger not just our rights and our security, but public health. These cases show that in Egypt people can be locked up not because they have committed a crime, but simply because they have a virus. In Egypt, people can be tortured not for what they have done, but simply for who they are. It is time to repeal the law on "debauchery that police use to jail people based not on criminal evidence, but on a test of their serostatus. Armed with it, authorities misuse medical procedures, such as testing, not to further therapeutic care, but to single people out for segregation and punishment. The World Health Organization has condemned forcible testing for HIV: it violates basic rights to the privacy and security of the person. Informing someone of his HIV status should be followed by counseling and treatment not prison and a death threat. Reported figures suggest that Egypt has only a small number of people living with HIV/AIDS, for now. The Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates it as under 20,000 in a population of 70 million. The challenge is to keep this number small. HIV/AIDS is not a contagious condition; transmission is easy to prevent with a modicum of knowledge; those living with HIV are no danger to those around them. The key to containing HIV is spreading information. That means outreach to those who are vulnerable, not criminalizing them. It means protecting people's confidentiality so that they can seek information freely, not fear to visit doctors, learn their own HIV serostatus, or find out how to protect themselves against infection. For most people in Egypt, information about HIV/AIDS is still in short supply. HIV tests remain unknown or unavailable to most people, so they cannot learn about their HIV status. Only one percent of intravenous drug users in Egypt have ever taken an HIV test. Many women are still not empowered, economically or culturally, to make educated choices that could affect, or indeed save, their lives. One survey found that only 6 percent of women have adequate information about HIV. A virus is a very simple thing, a tiny strip of pure genetic material that needs to attach itself to a host cell to survive. A virus like HIV inserts itself into a human cell and then uses the cell to run off copies of itself, over and over again. It uses us like a propaganda machine, to send out its own misinformation. Information is the remedy: telling the truth about how to prevent it and how to treat it. Information can help to stop its spread and can also stem the fear that shrouds it. Fear has its own means of multiplying. It breeds on prejudice as well as the silence which keeps ignorance entrenched and impunity enthroned. Egypt's police stations are already enclosed in silence where torture goes unpunished; its prosecutors' offices are already sheathed in silence where violations of rights go unacknowledged. Now we see how the same silence also feeds ignorance about medical facts and fosters violence and abuse against those who need treatment and care. Men who need care are chained to pallets in Cairo hospitals, and that is horrifying. The real disorder and the real fever, though, are the silence and fear that put them there. Aida Seif Al-Dawla is a professor of psychiatry at Ain Shams University and a member of al Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence; Gasser Abdel-Razek is acting director of regional relations at Human Rights Watch.
