China to hear first HIV job discrimination lawsuit

From The NY Times:

BEIJING — In what appears to be a first for China’s legal system, a court in Anhui Province has agreed to hear a complaint by a prospective schoolteacher that he was illegally denied a job because he is H.I.V. positive, the man’s lawyer said Tuesday.

The unidentified man, said to be in his early 20s, brought the case under a 2006 national regulation that prohibits job discrimination against people with H.I.V., his lawyer, Zheng Jineng, said in a telephone interview from Hefei, the provincial capital.

Mr. Zheng said the case would be heard by a district court in Anqing. The plaintiff contends that he passed a written test and interviews for a teaching job there, but that the city education bureau rejected him after a physical examination showed he was infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

“In the past on sensitive cases like this, the court would be very reluctant to accept the case,” Mr. Zheng said. “But this time they accepted it smoothly and quickly. That means the legal system in China is making progress.”

H.I.V.-positive Chinese suffered official and public discrimination for years after the disease first surfaced in the country in 1986. Infected students were often forced to leave school and workers were shunted from their jobs.

More recently, the national government has taken a tolerant approach, offering free antiretroviral drugs and prenatal care to many people who are H.I.V. positive, as well as screening for those who suspect that they might be. Many migrants remain unable to receive the services, however, because they lack the appropriate residence papers.

The National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, has approved a law that bans employers from discriminating against job applicants with certain kinds of communicable diseases, as chosen by state regulators. But the basis for the Anhui lawsuit is a regulation issued in March 2006 by the State Council, the government’s senior management body, which states that “no institution or individual shall discriminate against people living with H.I.V., AIDS patients and their relatives.”

More than four years later, no court had placed an H.I.V. discrimination case on its docket until Monday’s decision, said Yu Fangqiang, the chief coordinator for Yirenping, a Beijing-based civil-rights advocacy group involved in the Anhui case. The group paid the court fee to file the lawsuit, and Mr. Zheng waived his legal fees for the case.

Mr. Yu said he agreed with Mr. Zheng that the court’s acceptance of the discrimination lawsuit was a sign of changing legal standards. But he added that news media coverage had probably played a crucial role in the court’s decision, which had been delayed until the Chinese journal Legal Daily ran an article about the case.

The newspaper, he said, “is a must-read for a lot of people in the legal system. I think the media played a role in the court accepting this case.”

Yirenping, the rights group, had filed as many as 15 other lawsuits similar to the Anhui complaint in the past, Mr. Yu said, but courts uniformly rejected them. Many other H.I.V.-positive citizens approached the organization for advice on suing, but later dropped the idea for fear that their confidentiality would be compromised, he said.

But the Anhui plaintiff, he said, was determined to pursue a lawsuit.

“He was born to a poor family in the countryside,” Mr. Yu said, “and a job as a teacher means a lot to him — stable pay and a decent job.”