A man serving a life sentence for killing an Ottawa police officer has won a human rights award for helping educate other prisoners about preventing HIV infection.

Peter Collins, 46, has been honoured with the 2008 Canadian Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network announced Monday.

The non-profit research and advocacy group has been handing out the award each year since 2002.

"Peter has been involved in fighting for the health and human rights of prisoners, including access to harm reduction programs, for most of his 25 years in prison," Giselle Dias of the Prisoners' HIV/AIDS Support Action Network (PASAN), the community-based organization that nominated Collins for this year's award, said in a statement.

"We're very pleased that his work has been recognized, and hope that it raises awareness of how often prisoners' health is disregarded and their human rights ignored."

Collins has spent the past 25 years behind bars for killing a police officer during a botched armed robbery. He has been counselling and educating other inmates about HIV for most of that time, and is currently incarcerated at the Bath Institution, a medium-security prison about 20 kilometres west of Kingston, Ont.

His fight for harm reduction programs sometimes led to clashes with authorities, said the group that handed out the award. But it helped generate initiatives such as a pilot project that set up tattoo parlours at six correctional institutions to prevent prisoners from giving each other tattoos using objects, such as pen casings, that could spread disease.

The program ended in 2006.

Father proud

Peter's father, Michael Collins, who lives just southwest of Ottawa in Carleton Place, said he's proud of his son.

"All these years that we've been living with Peter being in prison," he told the Canadian Press. "And then to have this come out of the blue, that he's such a notable person that they're going to give him an award — it makes a nice change."

Figures provided by Correctional Service of Canada and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year showed that in 2004, more than 3,300 male and female inmates in Canada's 54 prisons had hepatitis C in 2004 and almost 200 prisoners were infected with HIV.

A 2004 report on the health of inmates that was commissioned by the correctional service showed that inmates were 30 times more likely to inject drugs than non-prisoners. They were also 20 times more likely to have hepatitis C and 10 times more likely to be infected with HIV than the non-prison population.

With files from the Canadian Press