By Kilian Melloy

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff faces questions from Jacques Barrot, the European Commissioner for Justice, who would like to know why travelers HIV positive travelers are not able to make use of the U.S. Visa Waiver Program.

Pink News reported in a June 20 article that Barrot had requested that Chernoff furnish the European Commissioner for Justice with "information on the reasons why individuals carrying HIV are excluded from using the US Visa Waiver Program."

Barrots’s office has been under pressure from Ministers of the European Parliament regarding the ability of HIV positive individuals to travel into the U.S. The issue may be a sticking point as talks between the U.S. and the European Union continue on the subject of EU citizens gaining permission to enter the Untied States without the need for visas, which is the point of the so-called Visa Waiver Program.

Last month the EU approved a resolution that the talks include provisions for HIV positive travelers from Europe; the resolution also called for a guarantee that all EU citizens would receive equal treatment regardless of HIV status.

The United States has had a ban in place since 1987 on HIV positive travelers entering its borders. The US is one of 13 nations globally where such restrictions are in place, reported Pink News, including Iraq, the Sudan, and Saudi Arabia. Exemptions are possible, but are difficult to obtain. New regulations make it easier for HIV positive travelers to get waivers, but prevent recipients of such special visas from altering their status as visitors to the U.S.

Baroness Sarah Ludford, an MEP from the UK, has been a proponent of overturning that ban. The Pink Jews story quoted Baroness Ludford as saying, "I’m delighted that the Commissioner for Justice is responding to pressure from MEPs like myself and giving this campaign the attention it deserves by taking it up with the US authorities."

Continued Ludford, "My colleagues in the European Parliament and I have fought hard to get this issue included in EU negotiations over US visa waiver policy and this represents a great leap forward for the campaign."

Baroness Ludford’s Web site invites viewers to sign a petition calling for the repeal of the travel ban. The petition reads, in part, "We are profoundly concerned at the current unjustified discriminatory treatment of people living with HIV or AIDS by the US authorities, in denying them the visa-free travel enjoyed or envisaged by their EU compatriots and making the obtaining of a visa extremely difficult such that the restrictions amount in practice to an almost complete travel ban."

The petition continues, "We assert that the refusal of visa waiver on grounds of HIV/AIDS has no objective justification since the European Commission and UNAIDS both confirm there is no public health rationale for restricting freedom of movement, and we believe that the travel ban therefore represents discriminatory treatment and a denial of human rights."

Adds the text of the petition, "We maintain that people with HIV/AIDS are entitled to lead full lives without the exceptional and unfair burden of being required to publicly disclose their HIV/AIDS status as a condition of entry to the US, such that if they are positive, their status becomes a permanent part of their record placing them at further risk of discrimination," and issues a demand that citizens of all 27 EU member nations be extended an automatic waiver to the ban.

Barrot sent Chertoff a letter in which he pressed for exemptions form the HIV traveler ban for EYU citizens, saying, "As you are undoubtedly aware this is an issue very sensitive to me and raising also some political concern at EU level in particular in the European Parliament."

The EU is not alone in questioning the need for such a ban. The Pink News story pointed out that a statement from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS (UNAIDS) issued last month declared that, "There is no need to single out HIV for specific consideration as an exclusion criterion."

The issue has been deliberated in the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations due to language added to an Emergency AIDS Relief bill by Sen, John Kerry and Sen. Gorgon Smith. The senators had inserted language that would have struck down the ban.