A/HRC/16/69 37. With regard to access to HIV services, at the Geneva consultation, Caritas Internationalis emphasized the urgent need to ensure access to treatment for children living with HIV. Paediatric formulations of antiretroviral treatment remained out of reach for many children because of costs and other barriers. Several respondents asserted the importance of removing barriers to access to HIV testing for children and adolescents. UNICEF noted that HIV testing was often unavailable to children and young people, partly because of denial that they might be sexually active; it therefore urged Governments to overcome this reticence. The Government of Belize was exploring the idea of eliminating the requirement of parental consent for HIV testing for persons under 16 years of age. The Government of Sweden described its specialized HIV resource centre for children and adolescents, which disseminated information about services for young people, conducted training programmes and produced guidance for teachers, parents and young people. H. HIV testing 38. Many respondents suggested that protecting human rights linked to HIV testing remained a challenge. In many countries, mandatory testing was legal in a number of circumstances, including as a condition of employment in certain jobs, as a condition for obtaining a marriage licence, upon entry to prison, as a condition of entry to or residence in some countries, including for profiling individuals from countries with high HIV rates, and upon arrest or detention for prostitution. There did not appear to be a public health basis for these measures, which violated human rights. The Sex Workers Forum of Vienna reported that sex workers must be tested for HIV four times a year in Vienna, which had the effect of making clients more likely to demand sex without condoms. The Best Practices Policy Project stated that, in the United States, mandatory testing of arrested sex workers had sometimes resulted in the dissemination of information about their HIV status in the mass media, a violation of their rights. 39. Some respondents noted that ensuring confidentiality of the results of HIV tests continued to be uneven in spite of guarantees of confidentiality in HIV laws or public health regulations. Fear of breaches of confidentiality together with HIV-related stigma was reported as a barrier to the scaling-up of HIV testing. Some countries reported focused efforts to enforce confidentiality provisions in the law or in health regulations. 40. At the Geneva consultation, the representative of the Young Women’s Christian Association asserted that provider-initiated HIV testing sometimes shortchanged or eliminated counselling, which was critical for people to understand the consequences of testing and a positive diagnosis. She cited the results of a survey of women living with HIV in Europe and Central Asia, among whom 54 per cent had received no counselling when they were diagnosed with HIV, and 33 per cent had experienced violence from their husbands or sexual partners when HIV-positive status had become known. Of these women, only half chose to disclose their status to their regular sexual partners. I. Criminalization of HIV transmission and exposure 41. The Guidelines on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights and the 2008 UNAIDS/UNDP policy brief entitled “Criminalization of HIV transmission” emphasized that the application of criminal law to HIV transmission should be restricted to the rare case in which intentional transmission could be demonstrated. In addition, such cases should be handled using existing criminal law rather than by passing new HIV-specific laws. Member States, United Nations and non-governmental organization responses indicated that, in many countries, HIV-specific laws or court decisions had opened the door to prosecutions not limited to these rare cases. GE.10-17842 13