Matthew Weait Inaugural Lecture 'Unsafe Law: Public Health, Human Rights and the Legal Response to HIV'

Event description

Professor Matthew Weait, Professor of Law and Policy, will deliver his Inaugural lecture on 18 June 2012 starting at 6pm in the Beveridge Hall, Senate House.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

Introduction: Professor David Latchman CBE, Master, Birkbeck College

Vote of Thanks: Professor Jane Anderson, Chair of the British HIV Association

Lecture Summary: Three decades after the first cases of AIDS were identified, more than thirty million people globally are living with HIV. Despite being first and foremost a public health issue, HIV and AIDS have been constructed as legal problem to which - at least in part - punitive and coercive laws can provide a solution. In this lecture, Matthew Weait will explore the dangers and absurdities of this, and how the use of such laws has had a negative impact both on prevention efforts and on the lives of people with HIV. Reflecting on more than a decade of scholarship, research and policy involvement at a national and international level, he will argue in favour of a harm reduction approach to the use of law, and that unsafe law can, and must, be made safer if the world is respond effectively to the virus.

This lecture is part of Law on Trial, details of the full weeks programme can be found here www.bbk.ac.uk/lawontrial