President Vetoes Bill On AIDS Testing

President Boris Yeltsin has vetoed a bill requiring foreigners to have AIDS tests on entering Russia, a senior Duma Health Care Committee member, Leonid Kogan, said Wednesday.


Kogan said he had received a statement Monday disclosing the veto of the controversial bill, which raised a storm of protests from abroad and among AIDS activists after it received strong support in the State Duma.


The issue is so delicate that neither the president's office nor the Health Ministry would confirm Kogan's statement even though reports of the veto have been circulating in Moscow since Friday.


"He vetoed it," Kogan said in a telephone interview. "I got a document from the president saying it (the bill) could not be accepted in its present form." Kogan heads the Duma Health Care law-drafting subcommittee.


Kevin Gardner, director of the AIDS-prevention organization AESOP, said the president's press service had earlier confirmed to his office that the bill had been vetoed but then denied it.


According to Kogan, Yeltsin had objected to four points in the law, the most important of which was a clause ordering foreigners to be tested regardless of why, or for how long they were coming to Russia.


The bill requires that testing for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, be carried out in this country except for citizens of countries having reciprocity agreements with Russia.


Kogan said the president had also objected to the draft due to contradictions in several clauses but the Duma member declined to give details.


Whatever the reasons behind the veto, health activists were delighted that the bill would not be enacted.


"We welcome the decision very much," Johannes Hallauer, a senior official of the World Health Organization dealing with AIDS, said in a telephone interview from Copenhagen. Mandatory testing "does no good. It does not prevent the spread of disease but gives a false sense of security and the impression that AIDS is only coming from abroad."


Hallauer also said the tests would be impossible to implement and that they contradicted international standards on human rights and AIDS prevention.


Many opponents of the measure have also criticized it on the grounds that it would be too expensive to enforce and would sharply curtail business travel and tourism. The bill provided for the deportation of anyone who refused to be tested. The bill was overwhelmingly approved in November by the Duma, parliament's lower house, while the upper house passed it directly on to Yeltsin without taking a stand.


Despite the Duma's support for the bill, Hallauer said the measure, as it stands, is as good as dead. "The law cannot get into force," he said. "The Duma cannot possibly expect that the president will sign it in, say, three months' time if the same silly things are in it."


Kogan said the draft must now be revised and then be approved by both houses of parliament to become law.


Hallauer said about 25 million AIDS tests were conducted annually in Russia, although according to Gennady Roshchupkin, of Infoshare Russia, which promotes AIDS education, only 841 people are officially registered as HIV positive. Unofficial estimates are much higher.


But no matter how strongly they opposed the draft, many activists said it was necessary for the government to pass a law on AIDS to ensure that state funds would be donated to causes such as research, social services and treatment.


"If the law says these things must happen then they have to be financed," Roshchupkin said, "Otherwise they may be financed, or they may not."


No matter how much activists welcomed Yeltsin's decision, they did not believe it would influence the broader perspective on AIDS.


"It provides the opportunity to create a new and better law but it won't change societal opinion," Roshchupkin said. "There are too many problems already and people don't want to think about yet another one."