UNAIDS: The First 10 Years

UNAIDS The First 10 Years132 United Nations General Assembly Special Session2001For a few months before UNGASS, many UNAIDS staff were focused nearly exclusively onthe preparation for the Special Session. UNAIDS staff were managing meeting logistics aswell as support for the negotiations over the draft Declaration of Commitment (the actualnegotiations were run by the two facilitators, Wensley from Australia and Ka from Senegal),and negotiating with the large numbers of civil society representatives that applied toattend. Several staff practically decamped to New York from Geneva. Cravero recalled:“None of us really knew what we were doing when we began to prepare for UNGASS. Ithink we would have all been overwhelmed had we really realized what were in for”.The first round of substantive negotiations towards a UN resolution on HIV followed thepublication towards the end of February of the Secretary-General’s report on the globalepidemic.Although much of the political action was focused on New York, work continued elsewhere.Also in February, the European Commission approveda new Programme of Action to combat HIV/AIDS,malaria and tuberculosis. This included an increase inthe money allocated to health, AIDS and populationprogrammes.During the UNGeneral AssemblySpecial Session onHIV/AIDS, posterson New York Citybus stops were used toheighten awareness.UNAIDS/R.BowmanThe hard work of UNAIDS and its many partners onadvocacy bore fruit at UNGASS in 2001. This eventwas historic for a number of reasons. For threedays, AIDS was being discussed at the highest levelglobally, in the world’s most high-profile forum, bymany heads of state and senior leaders from othersectors. Every night, the AIDS red ribbon glowed onthe UN building, an image symbolic of the new levelof political commitment that would circulate aroundthe globe, on television screens and in newspapers.Fréchette reflected on the event’s importance: “It’sone thing for the Secretary-General to [make a] keymessage [as at Abuja] but it’s something else for theentire international community to actually explicitlyagree on a more detailed plan of action … it’s tooeasy to dismiss these conferences as ‘Oh, well, justdiplomatic society, what comes out of it?’ Well, what