From awareness to action

WITH evidence that the community, the workplace, and health facilities are the top three spaces where people living with HIV face discrimination, human rights group Jamaica Aids Support for Life (JASL) last Friday launched a new digital application which it says will help to tackle the persistent issue. According to JASL, its Know Your Rights app will provide simplified information on human rights and legal protection to its users. It will also assist users to understand what may constitute a rights violation and provide information on legal and support services that may be able to help them.

“This also came out of our years of work, seeing rights violations and people not knowing what to do. Sometimes people come to us and we say, ‘you should have or could have done that,’ and they would tell us that they didn’t know that they had this right. The app is being developed with funds provided by the European Union, where people can go on and get basic information about what their rights are in different spaces.

The app will address a right a day,” policy and advocacy officer at JASL Patrick Lalor told the Jamaica Observer, following the organisation’s handing over of certificates to beneficiaries of its Human Rights and Discrimination in the Workplace Course at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston. “If you download the app, every day for the first 65 days of the year, you’ll get a different right. And it will explain what this right means, what should happen or what shouldn’t happen.

If after having learned about this right, you find out that it was violated and you want to know where you can go to get something done about it, the app allows you to — based on the parish you are in — identify places where you can go. “It will show you a list of places. You may have multiple spaces for some parishes, you may not have so much for some parishes, but it will tell you the nearest place to you, where you can go to report the matter,” added Lalor.

He pointed out that discrimination in the workplace remains the place where people living with HIV face the greatest discrimination.