Government plans anti-HIV law

Malawi’s Law Commission is to review the country’s penal code to make the deliberate spreading of HIV a criminal offence, the BBC reported on Monday.
The new law would criminalise unprotected sex by people who knew they had the virus. The move has been welcomed by women’s groups although they caution that proving such offences could be a legal nightmare.
The Executive Director of the Gender Support Programme, Cecilia Mussa, was quoted by the BBC as saying that in Malawi the new law could affect many husbands who contract the virus through extra-marital affairs and then infect their spouses.

President Bakili Muluzi has described the spread of Aids as a crisis and called for stringent measures to contain it. He recently ordered commercial sex workers and their clients to be arrested on sight as one way of slowing down the rate of infection.