While various stakeholders have made pronouncements and calls to involve civil society, vulnerable communities and people living with HIV/AIDS, the processes, mechanisms or structures to enable this involvement have been inadequate and limited. This has constrained our capacity to be meaningfully involved in interventions and responses to HIV/AIDS.

Resources for HIV/AIDS programmes in the region have been woefully insufficient and mostly externally sourced, with governments allocating inadequate or decreasing internal resources. Data from UNAIDS show that coverage has remained dismal and scale up of prevention, care, treatment and support services has been limited. In 2004, only 19% of sex workers were covered by outreach prevention programmes, only 5.4% of injecting drug users were receiving HIV services and only 1% of men who have sex with men were covered by HIV prevention programmes. Well under half of people needing antiretroviral (ARV) treatment actually received it in almost all ASEAN countries.

As representatives of civil society organizations and regional networks, we hereby put forward the following recommendations to ASEAN Heads of Governments and States:

I. Political commitment and Advocacy
•	Provide leadership and actively participate in National AIDS Committees, where this is not currently the practice;
•	Prioritize HIV/AIDS alongside other development and social issues;
•	Ensure ample emphasis in policies, resource allocation and programming on containing the epidemic among vulnerable populations including drug users, injecting drug users, men who have sex with men, transgenders, sex workers and their clients, migrants and mobile populations, and indigenous groups;
•	Prioritize the sharing of lessons, good practices and policies that worked using evidence-based approaches;
•	Ensure the national HIV/AIDS programmes adhere to the principles of GIPA;
•	Facilitate and enable active and meaningful participation of Civil Society and communities affected in development, implementation and evaluation of national HIV/AIDS programmes and relevant ASEAN consultations and summits;
•	Ensure and sustain the development and implementation of impartial and evidence-based public information campaigns;
•	Acknowledge inextricable association of risk behaviour with HIV/AIDS and poverty.
II. Human Rights, gender equity and enabling environment
•	Protect vulnerable groups and PLWHAs from stigma and discrimination, especially those committed by health care providers, law enforcement agencies and the general public;
•	Review national legislation for consistency with evidence-based and internationally recognized principles of Universal Access. This should result in the creation of national comprehensive AIDS policies that decriminalize HIV-associated risk behaviour, improve protection of privacy and confidentiality of people living with HIV and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual identity and expression;
•	Integrate gender equality and equity across all programme areas, including budget and human resource development. Ensure that women and girls have access to services and commodities, e.g. male and female condoms;
•	Establish, expand and sustain programmes and services to prevent mother-to-child transmission;
	Support preventive technology research, including vaccines and microbicides;
•	Promote and support human rights education of PLWHAs and vulnerable groups. Establish accountability mechanisms that address human rights violations and facilitate access to justice for PLWHAs and vulnerable groups.
III. Sustainable financing and programming
•	Prioritize and allocate resources in proportion to epidemiological realities with emphasis on service delivery;
•	Develop multi year national AIDS budgets;
•	Allocate funding from the national budget for Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) and HIV/AIDS programming by non-health sectors;
•	Immediately implement a regular and detailed cost analysis of expanded national programmes and interventions, including civil society responses;
•	Earmark sustainable and long-term funds for civil society including funding for institutional development and strengthening and capacity building for service delivery, research, programme management and networking;
•	Lobby donors and financial institutions to provide foreign debt relief;
•	Involve and mobilize other relevant regional actors operating in similar or overlapping fields to contribute to and support national and regional action plans on HIV/AIDS.