Government is 'misleading' public about judgment to give prisoners ARVs - TAC
June 27, 2006 Edition 1
Tania Broughton
Durban: The government this week used its official mouthpiece to deliberately mislead the public about issues involving a ground-breaking judgment ordering it to immediately give prisoners with HIV/Aids access to anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment.
The Treatment Action Campaign, which was a party to an application brought by 11 inmates dying of Aids at Westville Prison in Durban, described an article posted on the government website as "deplorable".
On Thursday last week, Durban High Court Judge Thumba Pillay granted an interdict giving the government, the ministers of health and correctional services, and the prison two weeks to file with the court an ARV implementation plan for all prisoners at Westville with CD 4 counts of less than 200.
This count is a measure of the body's immunity. For at least 50 prisoners at the prison's Medium B (long-term) facility with counts of less than 200 the court ruling was literally a matter of life and death.
Last year the government gave an unknown number of sick prisoners medical parole. About 110 inmates have died of Aids-related illnesses at Medium B since the beginning of 2005.
South Africa has more than 160 000 prisoners in its 240 jails.
The TAC says there are no accurate estimates of HIV prevalence in SA jails, but prisoners are more vulnerable to HIV infection. It costs around R2 200 for someone to receive ARVs for a year.
Last week's judgment found the State had reneged on its constitutional obligations.
And yet the government appears intent on appealing the matter - and apart from wrongly claiming that it has already been granted permission to do so, it has also accused the judge of "unethical conduct".
The article, posted on the Government Communications and Information System (GCIS) website, claims that "the correctional services department has been granted leave to appeal against the high court ruling compelling the department to provide anti-retrovirals to inmates".
The TAC said this was not true. And this was confirmed by Judge Pillay's secretary yesterday who said no application for leave to appeal had yet been lodged.
The government spin-doctored article goes on to criticise the judge for not recusing himself although his daughter, a lawyer, had been involved in the matter.
The judge, in a second ruling handed down last week, explained that his daughter had simply been a correspondent attorney, "a postbox", for the Johannesburg-based Aids Law Project which represented the prisoners.
While adamant that this had not affected his objectivity, he granted the government leave to appeal on the recusal issue.
In the website article, correctional services spokesman Luphumzo Kebeni is also quoted saying that the prisoners were "demanding" treatment without an assessment, as required by the guidelines.
TAC's Nathan Geffen said this was not true.
"The judgment simply requires the State to remove all obstacles stopping prisoners from accessing the treatment. It is simply being compelled to implement its own policy in a reasonable manner, as required by the constitution."
Jonathan Berger, a lawyer at the Aids Law Project, said: "They (the government) are within their rights to appeal but they must not use it as a way of getting out of complying with the order."
Berger said should this happen and a prisoner were to die, the ministers could be held legally liable in a civil case "on a balance of probabilities".
Berger said if the government was serious about trying to resolve the matter as soon as possible, it should now approach the Constitutional Court directly, rather than allow the matter to be tied up in "appeals upon appeals" in the lower level courts.
