Two HIV positive men are suing a Chinese airline after they were allegedly banned from one of its flights in late July, the BBC reported Friday.
The two plaintiffs and their friend were preparing to board a Spring Airlines flight from Shenyang in northeast China when they were stopped by airline staff.
"After we got our boarding passes, we informed a Spring Airlines official that some of us had HIV," one of the men told the Fazhi Evening Paper, as translated by the BBC.
"The official immediately rang up the Shanghai head office for instructions, and then they told us the company has rules forbidding the transportation of passengers with HIV."
When the passengers tried to negotiate with the airline, the company terminated all of their tickets. The three took a train to their destination in Shijiazhuang, which is south of Beijing.
Both men are suing Spring Airlines for discrimination and are seeking $8,000 in compensation, according to AFP. It is the first lawsuit filed in China by a person against an airline for being discriminated against for having HIV.
"The court's acceptance of this case signaled that HIV carriers can protect their rights through legal channels," Cheng Shuaishuai, one of the plaintiffs, said according to AFP.
This may be the first lawsuit of its kind, but China reportedly has a history of stigmatizing those who are HIV-positive. At one time people with HIV were banned from traveling into the country. That ban was lifted in 2010, the BBC reported.
They are also banned from holding jobs as civil servants while others are sometimes turned away from hospitals, according to AFP.
According to Chinese law, airlines can ban passengers from flights if they have a mental illness, carry infectious diseases or may endanger other passengers. The plaintiffs' attorney, Liu Wei, said there was no evidence to indicate the men would have infected others on the flight, AFP reported.
Spring Airlines said it does not discriminate against people with HIV and suggested the staff was being paranoid. The airline's president, Wang Zhenghua, also said the airline would not turn away HIV-positive passengers in the future as long as they were not "overly noticeable" to prevent scaring other passengers.
