Last year, Camille Liu's future was looking good. He had met a woman - "a perfect match" – while working in Mozambique as an electrician. They fell in love, decided to move to his home country, Mauritius, get married and have children.

But when Anna Magurra arrived on the tropical Indian Ocean island, ready to accept her fiances proposal, a few bureaucratic issues stood in the way of their marriage - one of them was an HIV test.

Anna's test results came back positive. "I was shocked, devastated, incredibly sad and terrified," Camille related.

A few days later officials told them they would not be allowed to marry and that Anna had to leave the country within days.

According to Mauritian law, all foreigners who want to get married to Mauritians must test for HIV and if they are HIV positive, they are deported to their countries of origin.

Earlier this year, however, the government amended the legislation, and the couple can now legally tie the knot.

Fighting to get married

Sitting in a café in the capital, Port Louis, Camille, a Mauritian-Chinese in his mid-30s looks happy and relaxed for a man about to get married this week.

"After the big shock I got myself together," he told IRIN/PlusNews. "I promised her I would fight and do everything to marry her and help her to stay with me in Mauritius."

Camille approached Dhiren Moher, an AIDS activist, and one of the few people in the country who have publicly disclosed their HIV positive status. Moher then launched a campaign to get the government to change its discriminatory policies.

But the fight is not over yet. Mauritius still has laws which prohibit HIV-positive foreigners from getting a work permit, and Moher is now calling for the state to change this law.

Camille and Anna's wedding will be a small ceremony, attended by their closest family members, who have been supportive of the couple's battle.

Neighbours do not know about their situation, and stigma is a battle they know they are yet to win in a country in which very few people are open about their status.

"We want to keep this secret so that our life will be a little bit easier," Camille said.

The Indian Ocean island has an estimated HIV prevalence rate of 1.8 percent, but the country's rising drug problem puts many more people at risk.

Drug abuse accounts for 92 percent of new HIV infections in Mauritius, up from just 14 percent in 2002.

"Such laws as the one forbidding [people] to marry HIV-positive foreigners are not helping to solve the AIDS problem at all," said Nicolas Ritter, an activist with local AIDS group PILS (Prevention, Intervention, Lutte contre le SIDA).

"This law discriminates against people and deprives them of their most basic rights," Ritter, one of the first people in Mauritius to publicly disclose his status.

Norway and the European Union on Sunday urged southern African leaders to resolve the political crisis in Zimbabwe as their credibility was at stake.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg told heads of government of the 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC), meeting in Mauritius, that “this situation should not be allowed to continue”.

Louis Michel, EU commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, called on SADC to find a solution to the Zimbabwean government’s refusal to accept the initial results of the 29 March elections, in which the opposition won control of parliament, and according to provisional vote returns, President Robert Mugabe also lost his job.

"The dramatic effects [of the crisis] will mainly hit the population of Zimbabwe but they will also hit the whole region," Michel said at the Mauritius gathering, billed as a ‘Development and Poverty’ summit. "I understand that this is not very easy to do … but this is an issue which is important for [SADC's] credibility."

The Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) on Saturday began a recount of ballots in 23 out of 210 constituencies, which could overturn the opposition’s parliamentary majority. The main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), said the ballot boxes were being stuffed and it would not accept the recount.

The result of the presidential poll has yet to be released, three weeks after voting centres closed. It is expected that ZEC will order a runoff between Mugabe and MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, despite a growing climate of fear, in which opposition supporters are reportedly being persecuted by the security forces and militants of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party.

Zimbabwe was discussed at an extraordinary SADC summit in Zambia on 13 April. Then the region’s leaders called on ZEC to verify and release “expeditiously” the poll results “in compliance with the rule of law” and SADC’s electoral guidelines. Michel said he had been told by heads of government in Mauritius that no further statement would be made before the end of the vote recount.

Zimbabwe slammed

SADC officials on Sunday repeated that Zimbabwe was not up for discussion; they said the gathering was preoccupied with poverty and development issues, especially in the face of rocketing global food prices.

But Stoltenberg used his address to the summit to slam the Zimbabwean leadership. "The lack of results from the elections casts serious doubt about the willingness of the government to respect the voice of the people," he told heads of government. "The economic and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe, seriously affects the country, its people and the whole region."

Simbarashe Mumbengegwi, Zimbabwe's foreign minister, leading his country's delegation, rejected the criticism. "The vote counting is going fine," he told IRIN at the sidelines of the conference. "We will announce the results as soon we finish the count."

He later told reporters: "[The Norwegian Prime Minister] is clearly ill-informed. He is ignorant. Totally ignorant … Zimbabwe is a democracy."

On Sunday the 53-member African Union urged Zimbabwe to release the election results "without any further delay", and called for restraint from all parties.