ABSTRACT
The British press recently reported on two cases involving the transmission of HIV/AIDS daring consensual sex. In the first case, a British woman, Janette Pink, has succeeded in persuading the Cypriot authorities to prosecute her ex-lover, Paul Georgiou, for infecting her with HIV during their consensual sexual relationship. 1 Georgiou, who, like Pink, has developed AIDS, is to be tried in May 1997 on a charge of having negligently committed an act which carried the risk of transmitting a life-threatening disease. In the second case, Finnish authorities are to try an American, Steven Thomas, in June 1997 on several charges of attempted manslaughter as a result of his allegedly having had unprotected sex with between 100 and 200 women after he became aware that he was infected with HIV. 2 The Daily Express’s claim that the Georgiou case ‘will be studied around the world’ misrepresents the significance of the case in so far as the use of the criminal law in cases of sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS is not novel: there have been prosecutions in the USA and Canada, 3 albeit with varying degrees of success from the prosecution’s point of view. Nevertheless, this and the Thomas case do raise issues with which the Law Commission for England & Wales is currently grappling 4 and on which a final Commission report is expected within the next year. The Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network’s joint project with the Canadian Aids Society on legal responses to HIV/AIDS has generated a number of valuable discussion documents, and is due to publish its final report on HIV/AIDS and the criminal law shortly. 5 The central issues facing both the Commission and the Canadian team are, of course, first, whether the sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS should be criminalized at all and, if so, in what circumstances – should criminalization be confined to the deliberate transmission of HIV/AIDS or should it extend to cases of reckless, or indeed, as in Cyprus to cases of negligent transmission? Should consent to the risk of contracting HIV be a defence? This article briefly describes the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS before moving on to consider modes of criminalization and whether criminalization is an appropriate response to the spread of HIV/AIDS. The conclusion reached, on a number of grounds, is that criminalization is both inappropriate and dangerous.
