CHINA:Gao Yaojie, a 79-year-old retired doctor and Aids activist, has been freed from house arrest and given permission by China's top leadership to fly to the United States to pick up a human rights award, following the intervention of US presidential candidate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
A retired gynaecologist, Dr Gao is well known in China for exposing official complicity in the spread of HIV/Aids in her home province of Henan in central China, where thousands of poor farmers sold blood in the 1990s and have been infected.
"I do not know whether there will be more trouble. I do not know whether it will be smooth. I am going to receive the award for the Chinese people . . . for the Chinese people, Aids is still a tragedy," Dr Gao said. She is due to receive the Women's Leadership Award for Human Rights from Vital Voices Global Partnership, a US women's advocacy group with links to Ms Clinton, in Washington in March.
Police in the Henan capital Zhengzhou placed her under house arrest on February 1st, to stop her from travelling to Washington and embarrassing China, but the publicity caused an international storm.
Senator Clinton reportedly wrote to President Hu Jintao and vice-premier Wu Yi, urging them to intervene and let Ms Gao leave for the US. She was freed on February 16th.
Dr Gao is a remarkable figure, well known for her courage.
Her feet were bound, according to the since-abolished tradition, between the ages of five and 11. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s she was purged by the Red Guards and attempted suicide.
She has written books and pamphlets warning people about the dangers of selling blood, and incurred the wrath of officials for exposing how it was blood transfusions that spread Aids in her province, not sexual transmission as authorities claimed. She has also helped scores of Aids orphans find new homes.
It is not the first time Dr Gao has been stopped from receiving awards abroad. In 2001 she was barred from leaving China to collect the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, while in 2003 she was prevented from visiting Manila to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service.
As of last October, China had officially recorded 183,733 cases of HIV, including 12,464 victims already dead.