Today, the Radisson Blu Hotel was buzzing with life; people from all over the world, united through their badges with HRI’s signature and their thirst for information, networking, supporting one another, and well, juice, water, and other drinks!

International organizations have set up their stands, and delegates were passing by, collecting pamphlets, brochures, keepsakes, and signing petitions.

The Opening of Harm reduction 2013 took place on June 9th. Rick Lines, the Executive Director of HRI welcomed around 800 delegates, he introduced the theme of the Conference 2013 ‘The Value/s of Harm Reduction’. The theme calls on the urgent need to provide sufficient political and financial support to address the HIV epidemic driven by injecting drug use in many parts of the world, as well as the ethical basis of the harm reduction philosophy.
“The conference also sends a warm welcome to the Lithuanian Minister of Health Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis and thanks him for his timely commitment to attend the conference,” said Serge Votyagov, Executive Director of the Eurasian Harm Reduction Network (EHRN), the local partners of IHRC 2013.

Key note speakers from the UN, INPUD, Government of Lithuania, Switzerland, GFATM, Poland welcomed the delegates and presented their support for the Conference. At the end of the Opening, Mr. Lines presented Two Awards: International Rolleston Award to Kasia Malinowska from OSF and Carol and Travis Jenkins to Loon Gangte. The Opening took an end with a reception for the delegates.

We can see in the Conference Booth space MENAHRA calling to “Break the Barriers…Build the Future” in the MENA through the Roll-up that announces MENAHRA’s Second Regional Conference that will take place in November 12-15 in Beirut. To know more about the Conference you may visit this link: http://www.menahraconference.org//

On the first Conference day, A number of interesting topics around HR values were being introduced by speakers and delegates and life experiences were showed in the short movies of the film festival. The topics tackled Community, families, social justice, parents, access to treatment, Harm reduction for women who use drugs, children, youth, safer injection, new multimedia approaches to harm reduction programming,
Two speakers from MENA among others with MENAHRA’s support presented the HR situation in the region: Mr. Abdurraheem from ADUG explained their activities to advocate for the rights of Drug users and he introduced the repression exercised against drug users in Afghanistan by the Law enforcement, and Mrs NadyaMekdachi, the Executive Director of Skoun (One of MENAHRA’s Model programs in Lebanon), who presented the implementation of OST in Lebanon by the NGOs and Governments. Not to forget, the number of people who visited MENAHRA’s booth to get more information on the upcoming Conference in November 2013.

Stay tuned for more news on the upcoming days of the Conference !

All the best,
MENAHRA team