Two women from the northern province of Sughd have been jailed for intentional infection of men with HIV.
The Khujand city court has considered their cases.
An official source at the Khujand city court says the 22-year-old woman from Khujand, who knows that she is HIV-positive, had sex with four men, and the 30-year-old HIV-positive woman from the Bobojon-Ghafourov district had sex with 12 men.
The woman from Khujand has two underage children and her husband, who is also HIV-positive, is currently serving his jail term for theft. She was reportedly sentenced to one year in prison.
The HIV-positive woman from the Bobojon-Ghafourov district has got a jail term of one year and six months.
Meanwhile, the Sughd law enforcement authorities are seriously concerned over the increase in the number of cases of intentional infection of people with HIV in the area.
In a report released at a news conference in Khujand, Sughd chief prosecutor Habibullo Vohidov revealed on February 15 that six criminal proceedings were instituted in the province last year under the provisions of Article 125 of the country’s Penal Code – intentional infection of a person with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
“Meanwhile, seven such criminal proceedings were instituted in Sughd last month alone,” the prosecutor said.
387 new HIV-infection cases were officially registered in the province last year. In all, 2,411 people living with HIV, including 1507 men and 904 women, have officially been registered in the province since 2001; 714 of them have died.
Criminal transmission of HIV is the intentional or reckless infection of a person with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). This is often conflated, in laws and in discussion, with criminal exposure to HIV, which does not require the transmission of the virus and often, as in the cases of spitting and biting, does not include a realistic means of transmission. Some countries or jurisdictions, including some areas of the U.S., have enacted laws expressly to criminalize HIV transmission or exposure, charging those accused with criminal transmission of HIV. Others, including the United Kingdom, charge the accused under existing laws with such crimes as murder, fraud (Canada), manslaughter, attempted murder, or assault.
