Health+Law Sector Interview: Bethany Rodgers, HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC)

The HIV/AIDS Legal Centre (HALC) is Australia’s only specialist community legal centre dedicated to people with legal matters related to HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Based in Sydney, HALC has provided free legal services since 1992.

While HALC primarily supports individuals facing HIV- and hepatitis-related legal issues, its work extends far beyond casework. The Centre has a significant impact on policy, law reform, community legal awareness and education.

Bethany Rodgers, HALC’s Strategic Policy Lawyer, works across all of these areas. We spoke with Beth about her role and about the broader functions of a community legal centre dedicated to the needs of people living with blood-borne viruses.

Tell us about your role at HALC, Beth. What does a ‘Strategic Policy Lawyer’ do? And how does this differ from other roles at the Centre?

HALC often sees recurring legal problems – clients facing similar difficult experiences, the same sets of unresolved outcomes, or being forced through similarly lengthy and stressful legal processes. The core of my role, as the title suggests, is strategic advocacy and law reform, along with increasing community understandings of the law, so that we can address these persistent issues at the larger, systemic level.

Many of the legal challenges our clients face are structural and so, as well as helping individuals to navigate these issues, we need to think about larger solutions at the level of policy or law reform. Such reforms can create lasting, widespread change for people living with HIV or hepatitis.

Most of my colleagues are more client-facing than I am, but their work directly informs mine and we identify trends, emerging issues and opportunities for reform together. These issues range from long-standing challenges, like discrimination and vilification, to evolving ones such as migration law reform and mandatory disease testing.

Beyond policy, I also assist with HALC’s operations and intake processes, and provide some legal services, particularly on cases that can be conceived of as ‘public interest’ matters and that therefore have the potential to be part of ‘strategic litigation’, such as insurance discrimination cases, for example.

So, in addition to supporting individuals with their specific legal issues, HALC has broader functions. Can you tell us a bit more about some of those?

Exactly, HALC does a range of these other things. Like many specialist community legal centres, we deliver targeted community legal education to professionals, peer workers and community members. For example, we regularly provide healthcare and social workers with training on topics such as HIV disclosure law and migration law. There is also often community interest in legal education about discrimination and privacy, and how these areas of law affect people living with HIV and chronic hepatitis.

Another area we work on is resources and information. We create legal information guides and other resources for the general community to access so they can understand their rights and legal obligations, and – again – also for the workers and professionals that support them. These resources help provide clarity and resolve common misconceptions, but also empower people living with HIV and hepatitis with knowledge. For example, they can assist them to make informed decisions on whether to disclose their HIV or hepatitis status, as there are few situations where they are legally obliged to do so. Currently we are in the process of developing a website that consolidates legal information relevant to disclosure of HIV status from every state and territory.

Research is another part of our work. We partnered with Health+Law on the National Legal Needs Study (LeNS), assisting with recruitment and supporting participants to do interviews and surveys. We also received funding for a dedicated research solicitor to ensure people with unmet legal needs could access HALC’s free, specialist services. We’ve also collaborated with Health+Law to understand trends in the types of legal problems people living with HIV experience and the demographics of our clients, by lending our own historical data for analysis. Recently, we researched the Centre itself – albeit with the oversight and sense-making of independent evaluators – to understand and assess our own impact, both on individual clients and the systems that affect them.

Law reform and legal advocacy are a significant part of your role at HALC. Can you tell us a bit about that work, too?

Yes, that’s right. HALC tries to play a key role in legal advocacy and law reform around any areas that impact people living with blood-borne viruses. We are always on the lookout for opportunities to contribute to legislation and policy submissions when our expertise might be valuable, and when it can lead to positive changes for people living with HIV and hepatitis.

Right now, for example, HALC is working on two reports investigating insurance discrimination against people living with HIV, funded by Gilead Sciences. The reports scrutinise insurance companies’ reliance on actuarial and statistical data to claim exemptions under anti-discrimination laws when denying coverage for people with HIV.

I’m also working alongside other organisations in the sector to prepare a submission to the NSW Law Reform Commission’s review of the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (NSW). Our recommendations for this submission draw on decades of HALC’s casework.

And we’ve seen real influence and impacts from many of our submissions in the past. For example, HALC’s submission to the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Act review, which we worked on with the National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA) and Queensland Positive People (QPP) was referenced 49 times in the final report of the Queensland Human Rights Commission. Our 2022 submission to the Equality Bill was cited five times in the Community Services Committee’s report.

This expertise stems from years of dedicated work by my colleagues, including our former Principal Solicitor Alexandra Stratigos, who was at HALC for 15 years, and our current Principal Solicitor Vikas Parwani, who has worked at the Centre for 9 years, both building a strong foundation of legal advocacy.

This interview is being published on World Hepatitis Day. From your experience at HALC, what are the biggest legal challenges facing clients living with hepatitis B?

Many people living with hepatitis B in Australia are migrants or asylum seekers, or other types of non-citizens, which means they face complex and lengthy visa processes, often compounded by language barriers and limited resources. Migration uncertainty can cause intense anxiety. While hepatitis B is generally no longer necessarily a barrier to migration from a legal perspective, misinformation and inconsistent advice still leave clients fearing their health status might affect visa outcomes. This can also have a ‘cascading effect’, which means that it leads to other legal problems – for example, with their employers.

Disclosure and privacy are also major issues for people in the hepatitis B-affected community. For example, pre-employment medical assessments raise questions about what people are legally required to share and how that information might be used.

And, of course, stigma and discrimination continue to create all kinds of legal and other issues for people. We’ve seen hepatitis B weaponised in domestic violence or family law disputes, for example, which is a deeply harmful and unjust tactic.

Finally, Beth, what has motivated you to work at the intersection of blood-borne viruses and the law?

I’ve always been drawn to social justice work, though I never expected to end up in this area. I applied to HALC on a bit of a whim, and it turned out to be the perfect fit.

Being part of the queer community helps me relate to many of our clients, who are often LGBTQ+ or are experiencing other intersections of disadvantage. My sister lives with treatment-resistant schizophrenia, a condition surrounded by stigma and that exposed her to relentless barriers, often within the very systems designed to help. I grew up feeling acutely aware of how profoundly the stigma surrounding certain health conditions can affect people, and the law plays a significant and complex role in this.

I’m proud to work with the HALC team and all of our partners toward a society that is more inclusive and just for people living with HIV and hepatitis; and I see this work as going beyond blood-borne viruses to address all kinds of stigma, including homophobia, racism, xenophobia and the stigmas surrounding mental and physical ill-health.

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