Poster presented in XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna 2010, on Wednesday 21st July.

We consider women’s empowerment and gender equality to be cross-cutting issues necessary for making progress on all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and especially important in achieving the health related MDGs 5 and 6. Improving maternal health or halting the HIV/AIDS epidemic cannot be achieved without guaranteeing the basic conditions that will allow women to exercise their fundamental human rights, including sexual and reproductive rights.

Recalling General Assembly resolution 60/262 of 2 June 2006, by which the Assembly adopted the Political Declaration on HIV/AIDS, which calls for, inter alia, halting and beginning to reverse, by 2015, the spread of HIV/AIDS, and scaling up significantly national efforts to achieve the goal of universal access to comprehensive prevention programmes, treatment, care and support by 2010,

The 43rd Session of the CPD was held in New York from 12-16 April 2010. The Commission discussed the theme “Health, Morbidity, Mortality and Development” and as a result of the negotiations with governments, a final resolution on this theme was adopted on Friday, 16 April. This resolution contains many important elements regarding the links between health, maternal mortality and morbidity and HIV/AIDS.

In the framework of the 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from March 1-12, 2010, “Strategies from the South” organized and sponsored an official parallel event about: “The challenges of HIV/AIDS from Beijing to 2010”. The session was held on March 4, from 6:00-7:30pm on the 10th Floor of the UN Church Center.