The Global Commission on HIV and the Law: recommendations for legal reform to promote sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The Global Commission on HIV and the Law was established in 2010 to identify and analyse the complex framework of international, national, religious and customary law shaping national responses to HIV and the well-being of people living with HIV and key populations. Two years of deliberation, based on an exhaustive review of international public health and human rights scholarship, as well as almost 700 testimonials from individuals and organizations in more than 130 countries, informed the Commission's recommendations on reform to laws and practices that criminalize those living with and vulnerable to HIV, sustain or mitigate violence and discrimination lived by women, facilitate or impede access to HIV-related treatment, and/or pertain to children and young people in the context of HIV. This paper presents the Commission's findings and recommendations as they relate to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and examines how the Commission's work intersects with strategic litigation on forced sterilization of women living with HIV, legal reform on the status of transgender individuals, initiatives to improve police treatment of female sex workers, and equal property rights for women living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

Panel: Canada's law on global access to affordable medicines.

This article provides summaries of the four presentations made during this panel. Tenu Avafia describes the evolution of international agreements concerning intellectual property rights, which formed the basis of Canada's Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR). Cailin Morrison describes how the CAMR works, outlines the limitations of the CAMR, and discusses recent attempts to reform the CAMR. Bruce Clark, whose company, Apotex Inc. has provided a generic ARV drug to Rwanda under the only compulsory licence issued to date under the CAMR, discusses the challenges of the current CAMR and outlines what improvements are required. Finally, Jillian Clare Kohler describes recent development in India, which amended its patent law in 2005, and how this relates to what is happening with the CAMR.