Majdi Al-Toukhi, a senior health-care specialist for the World Bank’s Human Development Department in the Middle East and North Africa region, told Arab News on the sidelines of the 2011 Qatar Symposium that the law would provide more than just protection.

“If we adopt the law for HIV people, that will be a great initiative for Saudi Arabia,” he said.

“The law is protection for people living with AIDS, in the workplace, in societies, in life. It’s basically an anti-discrimination law and declaration that we have these people in society and they have a right to be normal.”

He said on top of this law, it was important to engage with Saudi society at a grass roots level.

“Once (common people) hear that a guy has been affected with AIDS, they would treat him like a criminal. If you do that, then he will react in the same way a criminal does,” he said. “And then we create a bad taste in society.”

He strongly recommended that in order to cut AIDS prevalence in Saudi society, educating people at a grass roots level about the disease was absolutely key as it would help residents to take the necessary precautions.

Al-Toukhi did, however, stress that messages about AIDS had to be sensitively delivered, adding that it was important to start with the basic points such as how people contract the disease in the first place before moving onto more explicit ones in line with the conservative nature of Saudi society as a whole.

He also said it was important to engage wholly with religious leaders in the Kingdom, especially at a grass roots level.

“We have to educate the religious scholars, and they will in turn educate the others and so on. I don’t mean that we need to educate the top scholars as they already know about AIDS, but let’s start with mosque imams and so forth.”

The two-day Qatar Symposium, which finished on Wednesday, is this year focusing on family, the Millennium Goals and AIDS in the Middle East region.

At a session tackling issues related to the disease in the region on Tuesday, Regional Director for UNAIDS (the United Nations’ program for HIV/AIDS) Hind Khatib claimed only 14 percent of people who require treatment for the condition in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) area receive it.

UNICEF Regional Director Shahida Azfar said despite the progress made during the past decade, significant numbers of women, young people, and children are still suffering for AIDS in the MENA region.

She said in 2009, more than 6,400 children aged up to 14 in MENA countries became infected with HIV, the number of children in the same age bracket living with HIV rose to 21,000 and young people aged 15 to 24 living with the disease numbered around 24,000.