 The law can be a guardian of people who are vulnerable and who are sick, but the law can also be an awful nuisance in this area of HIV and AIDS, and in the past I have served on a number of bodies, most recently the Global Commission on HIV and the law, looking at the way in which the law is an impediment to successful strategies. That report was basically dealing with two areas. The first was the law and vulnerable groups. Often the law is the cause of the vulnerability. I'm thinking, for example, the laws against men who have sex with men, gay men. The laws that deal with prisoners, the laws that deal with refugee applicants, the laws that deal with sex workers, prostitutes, the laws that deal with injecting drug users. In these areas, law can be a burden on the person and on their freedom, on their ability to see the importance of getting the HIV test and getting on to anti-retroviral drugs if they turn out to be positive. So that's the first category of the report. The second was dealing with an area that sounds boring but is actually very important and that is intellectual property law, patent law, the law that protects authors and inventors in relation to their inventions, especially pharmaceutical inventions. And whilst there needs to be protection of the rights of inventors of new drugs, some of these protections are at the moment disproportionate both to the needs of invention and to the rewards that should go and to costly for people in especially developing countries. One of the areas that's been brought out in the Melbourne conference has been in respect of one of the so-called co-infections. The co-infections dealing with hepatitis. There are a number of hepatitis varieties but two of them, hepatitis B and hepatitis C are quite common infections. In fact there are millions of people with these infections and just taking hepatitis C there is a course of therapy which can effectively cure a person of hepatitis C. Hepatitis C in many, many cases goes on to cause cirrhosis of the liver and also it causes cancer and it's a very bad condition and it is contagious so it's a spreading condition. Unfortunately the drugs that are given in those cases are extremely costly because of the costs that are imposed by the patent holder, our Gilead Pharmaceuticals. In the United States if you want the 12 week course that will cure you, you have to pay $84,000 for the whole course. In Australia I assume it must be roughly the same. The patent owner has made it available in India for $2,000, $84 to 2 and it's made it available in Egypt where there's a very big hepatitis C infection for $800. It costs $84 approximately to make the drugs so we're talking about drugs that cost $84,000 and it's disproportionate to the inventiveness to require that people pay that amount and of course it puts it completely out of the possibility for people in many developing countries. I think it's a long term issue for HIV and AIDS and also for pharmaceutical products generally and perhaps for other areas of patent law. It's a long term issue because at the moment the law on this subject is stated in the so-called TRIPS Agreement, the Trade and Related Intellectual Property Law of the World Trade Organization and that agreement is basically in the hands of a body, the World Trade Organization, which is not a United Nations agency, it's essentially a cartel of the countries, many of them with intellectual property to protect and the law on this subject has developed without due respect for the fundamental human right to access to essential healthcare and what is needed as the Global Commission on HIV and the law pointed out is a new inquiry at an international level inaugurated by the Secretary General of the United Nations to investigate a reconciliation between the right to health and the right of authors to proper protection for their inventions and at the moment all the eggs are in the basket of the authors and it's not really a proportionate balance and that's why the Global Commission suggested that there should be a high level investigation and that is being considered at the moment by the Secretary General of the United Nations Bun Ki Moon and I am still hopeful that the Secretary General Bun who has been such a wonderful leader in issues of HIV and of sexuality will sign off on this and get the high level investigation to proceed but of course it will have some pretty powerful enemies and we've still got to wait you just have to watch this space.