A/HRC/16/69 reform was difficult. The representative of Lebanon at the Geneva consultation reported that the decriminalization of certain categories of drug offences there had greatly facilitated the provision of HIV services to people who use drugs. The Executive Director of the International Harm Reduction Association, a non-governmental organization based in the United Kingdom, pointed out that drug addiction was described as a “serious evil” in the widely ratified Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs (1961), language that tended to encourage demonization and exclusion of people living with drug dependency. The representative of the Association in the Geneva consultation, among others, called on Member States and United Nations bodies to recognize and address the fact that drug law at the national and international levels had been developed largely without reference to human rights norms. With regard to illicit drugs, sex work and criminalized same-sex conduct, leadership was urgently needed to change legal frameworks that had allowed the proliferation of arbitrary arrest and detention, lack of due process and lack of access to justice. 3. Sex work 21. According to the 2010 report on the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS, more than 100 countries had criminal laws against sex work or activities associated with sex work. These laws often gave the police great latitude to arrest and detain sex workers, sometimes at the cost of violating sex workers’ rights. As ESCAP noted, even in places where sex work itself was legal, sex workers were highly vulnerable to human rights abuse and marginalization. At the Geneva consultation, the representative of the Paulo Longo Research Initiative emphasized that sex workers were often arrested and detained for infractions of non-criminal statutes relating for example, to loitering and vagrancy. She also noted that sex workers in many countries had been “rescued” in the name of antitrafficking, sometimes in abusive ways, even when they had not been trafficked and did not seek to exit sex work. Relatively few respondents noted successes in ensuring meaningful participation of sex workers in HIV-related decision-making. According to the Best Practices Policy Project, a non-governmental organization, in the United States, no sex worker organization had been invited to participate in the development of the 2010 national HIV strategy, which did not mention sex workers, in spite of overwhelming evidence that police abuse and other human rights violations undermined sex workers’ ability to protect themselves from HIV. In Brazil, exceptionally, a national consultation on sex work and human rights was held in 2008, and the Government had supported the strengthening of a national sex work network. 4. Migrants and refugees 22. The International Organization for Migration stated that migrants were the least likely of any population to be able to participate meaningfully in HIV decision-making. Even when they were invited to participate, they often chose to remain invisible for fear of deportation or arrest. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted that refugees were often wrongly assumed to have high HIV prevalence or to be “bringing” HIV into a country. According to UNHCR, some progress had been made, in that 52 per cent of African countries had included refugees in national HIV plans, and 43 per cent of African countries had included internally displaced persons. Lebanon provided HIV services to Palestinian refugees within its borders. Nonetheless, many challenges remained. In Finland, Spain and Sweden, for example, many people living with HIV were migrants from countries with generalized epidemics; survey responses from those Governments underscored this fact as a policy challenge. Sweden expected to issue a new national policy on health services for migrants in 2011. The Government of Costa Rica noted the difficulty of providing HIV services for persons of irregular immigration status who did not qualify for health insurance. GE.10-17842 9