Publications

  • HIV Legal

    Health+Law and ASHM Health
    14 February 2025

    HIV Legal is an online guide to legal considerations involved in HIV care in Australia. It provides practical information and guidance to support clinicians to meet their legal and ethical obligations when caring for HIV-positive patients, and for community members and advocates to understand the legal frameworks surrounding HIV care and the rights of affected people. The only resource of its kind in Australia, HIV Legal has been published continuously since 2009. This updated, third edition was written and edited by Health+Law researchers in collaboration with ASHM Health. It addresses key areas of the law affecting people living with HIV, including informed consent, opt-out testing, mandatory testing, public health offences and the duty to warn, and more. Please note: the attached (static) report was up to date at the time of publication. Please check the HIV Legal website for information updates.

  • The Health Impacts of Law for People Living with HIV: A Systematic Review of Literature

    Health+Law
    6 December 2024

    The law plays an essential role in public health responses to HIV and in the health and wellbeing of people living with HIV. However, evidence on the legal issues experienced by PLHIV remains limited. This systematic review identifies literature on the justiciable (‘legal’) issues experienced by PLHIV in high-income countries, and their health-related impacts. A ‘justiciable issue’ is an everyday life problem with a legal dimension. Understanding these legal issues and their impacts is a key part of assessing the broader legal environment surrounding HIV, and to understanding what reforms to policy, law and legal practice may be required. Our review found that justiciable issues arise for PLHIV across multiple areas of law, and that these issues have health-related effects across multiple areas of social, economic and community life, with impacts on HIV prevention, diagnosis, initiation of and retention in care, treatment access and viral suppression, and good health-related quality of life and wellbeing. The results of this review provide an overview of legal barriers to appropriate HIV care and interventions in OECD countries, with specific legal needs and law-related challenges identified as moderators of the uptake of HIV care and other services. 

  • Hepatitis B and the Law in Australia: A Mapping Review of Contemporary Case Law

    Health+Law
    9 October 2024

    Understanding more about how the law affects people living with hepatitis B in Australia is a key objective of our national legal needs (LeNS) study. As part of LeNS, we conducted a legal mapping review of hepatitis B-related case law. This involved searching for, screening and developing an analysis and discussion of the corpus of hepatitis B-related judgments and tribunal decisions that have occurred in Australia across all jurisdictions. A review of this kind is a way to broadly ‘map’ the state of the law and legal issues of concern regarding hepatitis B in Australia. This is the first legal mapping review ever conducted in Australia on hepatitis B-related issues in case law. Our report includes a discussion of the results and preliminary implications of our findings.

  • HIV and the Law in Australia: A Mapping Review of Contemporary Case Law

    Health+Law
    30 October 2024

    The law plays a powerful role in public health responses to HIV and the health and wellbeing of people living with HIV. However, it has been over 30 years since the last major formal review of the legal environment surrounding HIV in Australia. Understanding more about how the law affects people living with HIV in Australia today is a core goal of our national legal needs (LeNS) study. As a preliminary step toward this, we conducted a legal mapping review of HIV-related case law in Australia. This involved searching for, screening, and analysing the corpus of HIV-related judgments and tribunal decisions that have occurred in Australia across all jurisdictions. This type of review seeks to ‘map’ the main areas of law in which HIV arises and to identify the key HIV-related legal issues of concern. To date, this review provides the most comprehensive mapping of HIV and the law in Australia since the advent of U=U, and includes findings that may inform future law reform and policy regarding HIV in Australia. Our report includes some preliminary discussion of the implications of the review’s findings.

  • Key findings from the 2023 ‘ACT NOW on Global HIV Migration, Mobility and Health Equity’ community forum

    Sexual Health
    10 October 2024

    The 2023 ACT NOW Community Forum, held as part of the 12th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science in Brisbane in July 2023, convened 150 delegates to discuss HIV-related migration laws. This paper reports on key themes discussed at the forum, including areas for ongoing investigation and policy activity, and proposes 10 recommendations for policy, law and practice change.

    To watch proceedings from ACT NOW on Queensland Positive People's website, click here.

  • Brief on Blood Borne Virus (BBV) Infection via Spitting or Biting

    Health+Law
    31 January 2024

    In response to the inconsistency across Australian jurisdictions regarding the legal status of using spit hoods in custodial contexts, this research brief reviews the available clinical literature around the transmission of hepatitis B and C via spiting and biting. The brief finds that the risk of transmission via spitting is very low for hepatitis B and negligible for hepatitis C; for biting, risk of transmission is also low.

  • HIV-related Legal Needs, Demographic Change, and Trends in Australia since 1992: A Review of Legal Administrative Data

    Health+Law
    2 December 2023

    Little has been understood about the legal issues, needs and access to justice for people living with HIV and viral hepatitis in Australia. This article, published in the AIDS & Behavior journal, analysed unique legal administrative data from the HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC) to develop insight into the trends and types of HIV and viral hepatitis-related legal issues experienced by HALC clients, as well as how these legal issues and HALC client demographics have changed over time, from 1992 to 2020.

  • The Legal Needs of People Living with an STI or BBV: Perspectives from a sample of the Australian Sexual Health and BBV Workforce

    Health+Law
    1 December 2023

    This article, published in the Journal of Law and Medicine, presents the first data on the incidence and impacts of unmet legal needs for those affected by a Sexually Transmissible Infection (STI) or Blood Borne Virus (BBV) in Australia using a survey administered to a sample of the Australian sexual health and BBV workforce.

  • New Health+Law research partnership

    UTS
    13 October 2022

    Media release from the University of Technology Sydney on the launch of Health+Law.

  • Positive Migration Guide

    HALC
    1 November 2021

    A guide to immigration for HIV positive people, their family members and others who fail the health criteria.

“This is an exciting and important project situated at the intersection of unmet needs in the legal and health sectors. This research will have international implications by generating new knowledge about how to meet the needs of people with BBVs.”

Dr Hamish Robertson, School of Public Health and Social Work, QUT