Church Leaders and Partners,

Ladies and gentlemen,

The program for your conference tells me that you are brave in your partnership. The most challenging issues confronting the global community today are on your agenda. Ethnicity and ethics. Credibility and dependency in partnerships. The issues of inclusion, unity and diversity. And in the middle of all this, the challenge of facing HIV/AIDS.

In Abuja this April, African leaders declared that AIDS constituted a state of emergency for the whole continent. Other regions of the world are reporting alarming infection rates. We are facing a global crisis. This calls for a global response. Global solidarity.

AIDS is a development catastrophe. But it is a lot more than that. Issues raised by the pandemic touch on all aspects of human life and all aspects of relationships. They involve values and ethics, sexuality and gender, rights and responsibilities, relationships and structures. AIDS makes visible symptoms of illness in human society far beyond individuals and families. Because it exposes forces that tear human communities apart and make people vulnerable. Particularly disturbing are the vulnerability of women and the exposure of youth.

The spread of AIDS, and the way it affects people, is as much related to poverty, oppression and social exclusion as to the virus itself. Structural, political and social mechanisms that sustain and aggravate poverty and leave people on the fringes have multiple bearings on AIDS, affecting both exposure to the disease as well as options for coping and caring.

Our fight against HIV/AIDS must be part of our fight against poverty.

For AIDS causes poverty.

And poverty undermines our struggle to combat AIDS.

As a partner in development, we have decided to incorporate HIV/AIDS into all aspects of our development policies. NORAD, our implementing agency, is required to include HIV/AIDS components into all sector-related efforts. HIV prevention is incorporated into all broader national strategies for development and poverty reduction.

Winning the war against AIDS will take an unprecedented mobilization of resources. Additional resources. It will take external resources mobilized through innovative, private-public partnerships, like the proposed Global Fund on AIDS and Health under the patronage of the honorable Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Even if prevention is the mainstay of our response, we must assume responsibility for those already infected. Effective health systems combine and reinforce both prevention and care. This is why we prioritize health system strengthening in our development policy. Obviously, we do welcome the recent progress in making AIDS-related drugs more accessible and affordable. We know that the churches in many countries make significant contributions as providers of health care and builders of health systems.

No government can deal with the challenges of the epidemic on its own. An extraordinary partnership with civil society and the private sector is called for, including faith-based organizations and networks like yours. Alliances with all democratic forces, across political divides, across religious divides, are called for. Within long-term strategies on a national and international level, churches, mission agencies and other faith-based organizations must take part.

Winning the war against AIDS will take courageous political leadership. The consensus reached and the commitment shown by many leaders of state at the recent United Nations Special Session on HIV/AIDS in New York shows true promise.

Fighting AIDS takes moral courage and gives meaning to honored concepts like charity and solidarity. Churches and religious organizations must be part of the solution in the war against AIDS and not part of the problem.

The church of Norway has shown courageous leadership. In a joint statement by all Bishops of the Church of Norway: they stated the following; "To the Church it is important to maintain that Christian charity engage us not to condemn, but to support those who are affected. We must contribute so that people living with HIV and AIDS can live openly within their community".

We must break down the wall of silence and denial, and try to overcome our natural shyness when talking about sex and condoms. In public. To our youngsters. The price of silence and denial has become much too high. Too high for parents. Higher still for millions of orphans.

It is our moral duty to fight this epidemic with all means available. We cannot allow ourselves to keep life saving information from the next generation.

Time has come to speak our minds clearly and to make sure that the church does not create deadly barriers that prevent people from using the most effective means to protect themselves. Condoms are now more a matter of saving lives than preventing pregnancies. Fortunately, not all churches are against the use of condoms.

My personal experience is that talking about condoms in public can make you blush at first, but with time it feels quite all right! Try it yourself, and you will see.

I was pleased to hear from the World Council of Churches during the UN Special Session that the WCC has adopted an official policy acknowledging and promoting the use of condoms as one option in HIV-prevention.

Churches have great potential of creating attitude change. The newly established Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance has chosen HIV/AIDS as one of its two priority areas for the coming years. Let’s hope their work will succeed in bringing on board all churches in the vital struggle against this deadly epidemic.

Many churches do wonderful work. The Salvation Army has, since several years, had outreach programs for prostitutes in India. The Russian Orthodox Church is slowly beginning to work with injecting drug users. In Thailand, both Buddhist and Christian groups have introduced homebased services and done important work to remove the stigma of AIDS.

I know that many of you are deeply engaged in the struggle against AIDS, and in the protection of people living with HIV and AIDS. I was moved by the statement of the World Council of Churches at the UNGASS in June. Rev. Gideon Byamugisha, an Anglican priest from Uganda who is living with HIV/AIDS, fell ill and was unable to present the statement of WCC, so one of his colleagues had to present it for him. The statement clearly voiced that the churches are directly hit by the HIV/AIDS crisis, and that " there is no division between us and them" anymore.

Facing AIDS, living with AIDS and confronting AIDS, creates spaces where we can all face and share our own story of brokenness and longing for healing. We, as a human community, have AIDS. And as a community our hope lies in confessing, coping, caring and confronting.

If the community has AIDS, so also the church. If human society - locally, nationally and globally - is called to confess, cope, care and confront, so even more the church. Christian congregations, with all their weaknesses, may represent the most stable social institutions in a community, giving people identity and belonging. They need to be there when people suffer. They need to be there as a sign of the presence, passion and inclusiveness of Christ in the middle of human pain and social exclusion. They need to be there struggling with difficult contradictions and moral dilemmas and searching for answers to honest questions, together with those who are most vulnerable. They need to be listening, caring and reaching out. Otherwise the church will loose itself.

We must offer partnership, not exclusion. Partnership with people infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. Innovative ways of including and working with such vulnerable groups as men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, prostitutes. Fighting AIDS will mean putting an end to abuse, discrimination and stigmatization. Vulnerable groups require particular attention, accompanying full respect of their essential human rights.

This challenge clearly includes churches and religious societies. When churches do engage in work with these often heavily stigmatized groups, the signal effects are tremendous. We must fight HIV/AIDS and not its victims.

We need a response firmly based on the promotion and protection of human rights. The right to development. The right to health. The right to life. The right to human dignity for all.

Faith-based organizations can play an especially important part in the promotion of basic human rights for all, as respect for the dignity of each human being is so fundamental. We need a human-rights-based approach because people whose rights and dignity are violated become more vulnerable to HIV infection. Because discrimination of those infected also discourages testing and undermines effective prevention. Experience has clearly shown that where individuals, communities and especially vulnerable groups are able to realize their human rights, the incidence of HIV infection declines.

Children and adolescents, young girls in particular, are vulnerable and disproportionately affected by the AIDS epidemic. So far, AIDS has orphaned 13 million children. Many of them have also lost their grandparents. Many have lost their teachers. Many their sisters, brothers or dearest friends. And perhaps worst of all; many of them carry the virus themselves. They are left with unimaginable burdens – on shoulders never made for coping with so much. Therefore, special attention must be given to the rights of children and young people. The right to education and the right to information are crucial in this connection. Young people simply must be given tools and life skills to protect themselves.

The epidemic places a heavy burden on women, too. In some countries infection rates for young women are four times those of young men. Women continue to bear the burden of caring for family members living with HIV/AIDS. Respect for the right to information, including information about sex, and respect for the right to reproductive health are essential in empowering women to protect themselves - and to reduce mother-to-child transmission of the disease. This includes the right to make sexual and reproductive decisions free from discrimination, coercion and violence. Women must be empowered so that they can truly protect themselves. Equally important, we must promote male responsibility.

In this country, our collaboration is inspired by African AIDS commissions. We have established a Forum for AIDS and development and an Aidsnet, where labor, business, culture, sport, churches, NGO leaders, the mass media, the research community and people living with HIV and AIDS join together as partners. As everybody are affected by the epidemic, people from all sectors and walks of life must come together to fight it.

In Uganda, a church leader has led the National AIDS Commission since 1995. In fact our Aids Forum recently visited Uganda to learn from their experiences and successes. Other countries, such as Senegal and Thailand, involved religious leaders early on in successful national prevention strategies.

Political and religious barriers must not prevent us from keeping the core issues in sight:

To protect future generations from HIV.

To protect the human value and dignity of those already infected.

We have no time to lose.