People who use and inject drugs are among the groups at highest risk of acquiring HIV, yet remain marginalized and unable to access health and social services. Evidence shows that new HIV infections drop sharply when drug use and possession for personal use is decriminalized and people who inject drugs have access to harm reduction and other public health programmes, and stigma, discrimination and marginalization are reduced. People who inject drugs, including people in prisons and other closed settings, have a right to equal enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, including the right to harm reduction services to prevent HIV and other bloodborne infections, including needle– syringe programmes (NSPs), opioid substitution therapy (OST), antiretroviral treatment and overdose prevention and management....

The 2021-2026 Global AIDS Strategy has bold and critical new targets on realizing human rights, reducing stigma, discrimination and violence and removing harmful punitive laws as a pathway to ending inequalities and ultimately ending AIDS. To aid in the scale up of interventions to remove these societal barriers, UNAIDS has produced a series of fact sheets on human rights in various areas, highlighting the critical need to scale up action on rights. They are a series of short, easy to digest and accessible documents outlining the latest epidemiology, the evidence of the impact of human rights interventions, the latest targets, and international guidelines, recommendations and human rights obligations relating to each topic. 

UNAIDS have released a number of factsheets

• HIV criminalization 
• HIV and people who use drugs 
• HIV and gay men and who have sex with other men 
• HIV and transgender and other gender-diverse people 
• HIV and sex work 
• HIV and people in prisons and other closed settings 
• HIV and stigma and discrimination.