People who deliberately infect their partner's with the Aids virus could face life imprisonment, if proposals published by the British government yesterday are adopted into law.
Some organisations leading the fight against Aids and HIV reacted angrily to the proposal accusing the government of criminalising people with HIV. Others welcomed it as a "clarification" of the law.
As the law stands, offences of this nature are already covered by the 1861 Offences against the Persons Act and include wounding, grievous bodily harm and threats to kill. However, launching the Home Office draft Bill designed to reform the Act, the Home Office Minister, Mr Alun Michael, indicated the terms of the new Act may be widened to deal with deliberate contamination of food such as salmonella or the release of viruses including anthrax.
Mr Michael said he did not expect a flood of prosecutions as a result of the proposal and warned against misrepresenting the proposals. Every year there were about 80,000 prosecutions under the current Act but there were none for the deliberate transmission of HIV, he said. Asked if he expected the level to remain at zero, Mr Michael said that would be "the most likely outcome".
The Home Office had consulted widely before putting forward the proposal. But Mr Michael revealed the Law Commission had wanted the government to go much further and include the term "reckless" infection of disease in the draft Bill. The government had rejected the idea because it believed the Act would guard against such an offence.
The draft Bill is expected to recommend the creation of a new offence of "intentional transmission of a disease with intent to cause serious harm". The proposed overhaul of the Act comes in the wake of the case of a British woman, Ms Janette Pink, who was infected with the Aids virus by her partner in Cyprus. He was aware that he was carrying the virus.
Mr John Nicholson, the director of the George House Trust in Manchester, an organisation that provides practical help for people with HIV, criticised the proposals. Arguing that the law already protected the public from someone who threatened to stab another person with a needle full of HIV infected blood, he said: "Whether there is HIV involved in these situations is irrelevant. What we are doing here is threatening people who have consenting sex. Their HIV status will turn them into criminals as well as the illness they are already experiencing or facing."
That argument gained some support from the Terence Higgins Trust, which gave a cautious welcome to the proposals. Mr Nick Partridge, the organisation's chief executive, said it was "essential" for clarification of the law so that it was "not open to malicious misuse".