Social media fuels HIV rights violations

Kenya’s HIV and AIDS Tribunal, set up to deal with human rights violations involving HIV, is increasingly hearing cases in which social media is used for the unlawful broadcast of people’s status. Among its important decisions, the tribunal – the only one of its kind in the world – has held that ‘disclosing’ people’s HIV status on WhatsApp amounts to a serious rights’ infringement. And those responsible are liable to pay damages, even if, at the time they made the claim, they didn’t know whether the claims were factually true or not. As Carmel Rickard explains in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, the nature of the cases heard by the tribunal has changed since it was set up in 2009, and it now increasingly hears disputes involving arguments on social media in which one party claims the other is HIV positive, sometimes making the claim as an insult, rather than because it is based on known facts.