Governments must not "opportunistically" use the global financial crisis to withhold funding for vital HIV/AIDS treatment programmes, a high-level conference attended by High Commissioners, policymakers and activists from around the Commonwealth heard last week.

"We face this financial crisis which is being used in the most opportunistic fashion by governments to say they can no longer afford to fund [interventions]," Stephen Lewis, former UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and co-director of AIDS-Free World, claimed, insisting that greater not fewer resources are needed to tackle the pandemic.

"We've lost 25 million lives and we've got another 6 million we are trying to save," he told delegates at the 'Supporting the Commonwealth Response' seminar at Marlborough House in London, UK, from 1-2 October 2009.

Acclaimed campaigner Mr Lewis insisted that the amount required to support sufferers was small next to the sums used to save stricken banks over the past year.

"Compare this with the trillions of dollars that have gone into bailouts and stimulus pack-ages," he explained, "we're talking about a few billion to sustain human recovery."

Mr Lewis called for new mechanisms such as a global currency transaction levy and increased access to medicines through a patent pool to help plug an "enormous" estimated US$12 billion annual shortfall in HIV/AIDS funding.

The conference and workshops- co-organized by the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Commonwealth Foundation, the Commonwealth HIV and AIDS Action Group, and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance - addressed the need to increase access to medicines, and advancing law reforms to increase the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS responses

The conference came just a day after a joint UNAIDS, Unicef and World Health Organization report revealed that although 4 million people are now receiving life-saving antiretroviral drugs, nearly two-thirds of those in need in regions like sub-Saharan Africa are not.

New ways of thinking

Dr Ernest Massiah, Head of the Secretariat's Health Section, echoed Mr Lewis's claim that the financial crisis is "affecting drastically how programmes are to be funded", adding that "money is now scarce and more fiercely fought over".

"Eighty per cent of the people who need treatment are in Africa, but 80 per cent of the drugs that they need are imported," he said in his opening remarks. "We need to think how we move forward to ensure drugs are more available and at more equitable prices."

Dr Massiah added that the meeting was an opportunity to agree on "new ways of thinking about old problems". It would help policymakers to "think outside the box and to strategise on the practical solutions," he said.

Zackie Achmat, founder of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa emphasized the important role of civic action in protecting the rights of HIV/AIDS sufferers.

"Every right to freedom, dignity, equality, the right to life, the right to freedom of association, all those rights, pre-exist any constitutional codification and the only guarantors of those rights are human beings," he said.

"No-one else guarantees those rights, and the only way those rights are enforced are through collective action. The institutions we use for that collective action are our parliaments, our judiciaries, and a range of other bodies that are part of the panoply of democratic constitutions everywhere."