WITH evidence that the community, the workplace, and health facilities are the top three spaces where people living with HIV face discrimination, human rights group Jamaica Aids Support for Life (JASL) last Friday launched a new digital application which it says will help to tackle the persistent issue.

According to JASL, its Know Your Rights app will provide simplified information on human rights and legal protection to its users.

It will also assist users to understand what may constitute a rights violation and provide information on legal and support services that may be able to help them.

“This also came out of our years of work, seeing rights violations and people not knowing what to do. Sometimes people come to us and we say, ‘you should have or could have done that,’ and they would tell us that they didn’t know that they had this right. The app is being developed with funds provided by the European Union, where people can go on and get basic information about what their rights are in different spaces. The app will address a right a day,” policy and advocacy officer at JASL Patrick Lalor told the
Jamaica Observer, following the organisation’s handing over of certificates to beneficiaries of its Human Rights and Discrimination in the Workplace Course at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston.

“If you download the app, every day for the first 65 days of the year, you’ll get a different right. And it will explain what this right means, what should happen or what shouldn’t happen. If after having learned about this right, you find out that it was violated and you want to know where you can go to get something done about it, the app allows you to — based on the parish you are in — identify places where you can go.

“It will show you a list of places. You may have multiple spaces for some parishes, you may not have so much for some parishes, but it will tell you the nearest place to you, where you can go to report the matter,” added Lalor.

He pointed out that discrimination in the workplace remains the place where people living with HIV face the greatest discrimination.

LALOR… if you download the app, every day for the first 65 days of the year, you’ll get a different right, and it will explain what this right means, what should happen or what shouldn’t happen

“We implement interventions from time to time to address discrimination in these spaces. So we have our community interventions for the community, we have the training of health-care workers for the health facilities. Currently as we speak, we have matters relating to workplaces that we are dealing with where people are experiencing discrimination. A significant number,” said Lalor.

Just over 100 people were recognised for their achievements as participants of the Human Rights and Discrimination in the Workplace Course, which Lalor said spanned just over six weeks and was done in collaboration with the Institute of Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies. The course was funded by the European Union.

“One of the key things we did when we were developing this course was to target HR [human resources] professionals within companies, because we wanted to make sure, one, the company had non-discriminatory policies, [that] the companies have a HIV workplace policy, and the companies had systems in place to ensure that employees get constant training in terms of how to relate to people living with HIV in the workplace.

“Also that these workplaces have diversity policies and non-discriminatory policies, and that we have HR professionals who are informed enough to ensure that these policies are implemented,” said Lalor as he noted that it is often discovered that many companies have policies but they are not implemented effectively.

He explained that many of the cases dealt with by JASL revealed that people who are targeted in the workplace and relay complaints to HR are often given bad advice.

“When they come to us and say, ‘I’m experiencing discrimination at my workplace because of my HIV status, sexual orientation,’ and I said, ‘Have you gone to HR?’ and they respond, ‘Yes, we have gone to HR, but they say ignore them’. That is one of the critical reasons why we target HR professionals, to ensure that they know that this is a violation of an internationally recognised human right, which is the right to work. And they have to do more than say ignore them,” said Lalor.