United Nations Human Rights Committee – Review of Canada at 145th Session NGO formal briefing March 2nd 2026
HIV Legal Network Oral Statement
Thank you Mr. Chair,
We will touch on 3 issues that are central to Canada’s obligations to uphold the rights to life, liberty, security of the person, and non-discrimination.
First, I will start with a major health crisis that should be a priority: Canada’s ongoing toxic drug crisis that has killed more than 53 000 people since 2016.
Despite this, Canada continues to adopt a punitive approach to drugs, including by criminalizing people who use drugs – contributing to the mass incarceration of Indigenous and Black people in Canada.
This punitive approach has also resulted in discriminatory barriers to care.
In particular, we are seeing increasing attacks against harm reduction services in Canada at all levels of government.
This is especially clear in the case of supervised consumption services (SCS) which prevent overdose deaths by providing spaces where people can use drugs under the supervision of trained staff or volunteers. Provincial governments have forced many of these sites to recently close. We are also seeing increasing restrictions regarding needle and syringe programs.
In prison, the lack of harm reduction measures has fueled significantly higher rates of HIV and HCV and a dramatic recent increase of deaths in custody.
Canada must decriminalize personal drug possession and remove barriers to harm reduction, including in prison.
With respect to the rights of people living with HIV, Canada continues to criminalize non-disclosure of HIV to sexual partners including where there was no transmission of the virus and no intent to transmit. People have been prosecuted even if they posed little to no risk of transmission.
Canada must end the criminalization of people living with HIV and reform the Criminal Code.
Finally, the UN has called on Canada to repeal its “excessive demand” immigration regime, which denies people permanent resident status based on projected healthcare costs. This fuels stigma and discriminates against people living with HIV and other health conditions.
Thank you.