Airline for court over refusal to take AIDS patients
Print Edition
A SHANGHAI airline is being sued for discrimination after it refused to allow three people to board a flight because two of them were AIDS patients.
A court in northeast Shenyang City has accepted a lawsuit brought against Spring Airlines by Chen Jie and two friends from central Henan Province, their lawyer Liu Wei said yesterday.
Liu said his clients were seeking an apology and compensation, according to the Legal Evening Newspaper.
After buying tickets at Shenyang Airport on the morning of July 28 for a flight to Shijiazhuang City, they mentioned AIDS.
Chen said a staff member then phoned the airline’s headquarters in Shanghai for clarification and later told them the carrier couldn’t take them because it was against company regulations.
Chen was told he could fly after he got a certificate from the airport clinic.
Doctors there told him there was no need and that AIDS patients could take flights, the newspaper reported.
But when the three went back to the airline desk they found their boarding information had been deleted and they failed to get on an afternoon flight.
The three eventually made their journey by train.
However, before they left the airport they staged a protest, holding up boards saying: “We are AIDS patients and Spring Airlines are discriminating against us.”
Their lawyer said: “Airlines have the right to refuse only those patients with communicable diseases that might threaten the health of other passengers but that doesn’t include AIDS.”
In a TV interview earlier this week, the president of the budget carrier said that all AIDS patients would be allowed to fly with the airline in future.
Wang Zhenghua told Phoenix TV: “AIDS patients should have the right to take flights and it was because the staff at the airport became too nervous when they heard of the disease from the passengers.”
But he said that AIDS patients should keep a low profile as they might not be accepted by other passengers.
The Civil Aviation Administration has not named specific communicable diseases and airlines have the right to decide whether they can take or refuse passengers, an official with the administration’s rights department said.
However, following the airport protest, nine domestic airlines, including the four biggest — Air China, China Eastern, China Southern and Hainan Airlines — announced they would not refuse AIDS patients.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS is transmitted by three main routes: sexual contact, exposure to infected body fluids or tissue, and from mother to child during pregnancy, delivery, or when breastfeeding.
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