A civic group on Monday denounced public servants, particularly those responsible for conscription affairs, over their careless handling of the privacy of people infected with HIV or affected by AIDS and called for improvements in the protection of such people’s rights.
Because of the ignorance of some public servants with regard to the right to privacy, a draftee with the pseudonym Hsiao Pan (小班) was kicked out of his home by his father, who opened a conscription exemption notification addressed to his son and discovered that the boy is HIV-positive, said Chang Cheng-hsueh (張正學), a volunteer for the Persons With HIV/AIDS Rights Advocacy Association of Taiwan.
The draftee had issued specific instructions that the letter should be held for personal pick-up, which he had the right to do, but the conscription authorities ignored the instruction, Chang added.
Hsiao Pan is not the only draftee plagued by family upheaval because of HIV infection or AIDS, Chang said.
Hsiao Mi (小米, also a pseudonym) had also informed the conscription unit in advance of his decision to take delivery of his conscription exemption certification in person, but again the Conscription Agency sent the letter to his home, where his mother opened it, to discover that her son has AIDS, Chang said.
Chang said the association had asked the agency before to respect the privacy of HIV-infected draftees.
At that time, the agency under the Ministry of the Interior said that it had instructed relevant personnel to treat such cases as classified and began allowing draftees exempted from conscription because of HIV/AIDS infection to pick their exemption notifications up in person.
Despite the instruction and the law stipulating the protection of the rights of the infected, the government functionaries who illegally disclosed Hsiao Pan and Hsiao Mi’s infection still claimed to be unaware of the regulations on the paperwork of such draftees, Chang said.
Some of them even argued that they think “parents have the right to know about the health of their children,” he said.
Although Hsiao Pan and Hsiao Mi have both received apologies from the conscription personnel involved, the word “sorry” does little to mend the damaged family relations of the two young men, Chang said.
Under the HIV Infection Control and Patient Rights Protection Act (人類免疫缺乏病毒傳染防治及感染者權益保障條例), competent authorities, medical institutions, medical personnel and other people who are in possession of information such as names and medical records of infected people are prohibited from releasing the information unless it is for the requirements of transmission prevention or medical care.
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