Nations try to patch up splits on sex at AIDS meet

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 2 (Reuters) The president of the United Nations General Assembly has sought to break the deadlock over a U.N.

declaration on AIDS, with Islamic countries objecting to empowerment for girls and the United States and others resisting defining financial targets.

Under pressure from more than 800 advocacy groups, some of whom threatened to leave the conference, Assembly President Jan Eliasson produced a new draft compromise text to be presented to ministers on Friday.

The three-day conference, which began on Wednesday, is assessing the worldwide fight against AIDS and is attended by thousands of activists, ministers and diplomats.

It is aiming to produce a non-binding declaration for use as a guideline for governments and to spur private groups and businesses into action.

African diplomats have come under particular fire for not insisting on a strong platform agreed by their leaders in Abuja, Nigeria, in early May and compromising with Egypt, which has followed the conservative stance of Islamic nations.

''We are very, very upset and disappointed at the state of the political declaration'', said Olayide Akanni, from Journalists against AIDS Nigeria. Among the Abuja goals is providing treatment for 80 percent of those infected by 2010.

But Peter Piot, the executive director of UNAIDS, the leading world umbrella group against the pandemic, said delegates were being more flexible since Eliasson produced a compromise text.

The United States, backed by Islamic nations, objects to any firm commitments to international financial goals.

Many delegations, particularly Islamic ones and some conservative Latin American nations, oppose mentioning prostitutes, drug users and homosexuals in the declaration.

They prefer citing ''vulnerable'' groups, fearing that specific mention would endorse these groups. Also in dispute are rights for girls and sex education, among other issues.

''Adolescent girls may become an extinct species in some countries,'' Piot said, pointing to the rapid increase of AIDS among teenagers, many of them married.

Adrienne Germain, president of the International Women's Health Coalition, said the Eliasson text was an improvement but still needed work. In particular it did not empower girls, a term usually applied to females under 18 years of age, and ''that is not acceptable.'' According to a UNAIDS report released on Tuesday, the spread of the pandemic had slowed but drug treatment is only available to less than half of those infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The last such declaration in 2001 spelled out targets clearly, such as the number of pregnant women and a percentage of those infected who should get drug treatment.

Most of the goals were not met except for financial expenditures for the developing world, which reached 8.3 billion dollars in 2005, with the United States donating more than any other nation.

Reuters SI DB1027