SOUTH AFRICA: South Africa's highest court yesterday rejected the government's appeal against a lower-court judgment that instructed it to provide the anti-retroviral drug Nevrapine to HIV-positive women in state hospitals, thereby forcing it to radically change its policy on the AIDS scourge.
Delivering judgment in the Constitutional Court, Chief Justice Arthur Chaskalson observed that the anxiety of the Treatment Action Campaign, which opposed the ANC-led government's appeal, was understandable. "One is dealing here with a deadly disease", he said.
He noted that the government would have to change its policy, which has been characterised by a controversial reluctance to provide anti-retroviral drugs to people living with AIDS and the belief that international pharmaceutical companies tend to exaggerate the AIDS threat to enhance their profits.
The Chief Justice, who presides over the 11-member Constitutional Court and who, together with his judicial confreres, is the ultimate guardian of the legal foundation of the post-apartheid state, the 1996 Constitution, ordered the government to pay costs.
The judgment meant that President Thabo Mbeki's administration had no option but to provide Nevrapine to HIV pregnant women when it is prescribed medically. The judgment simultaneously marginalised those elements in the ruling ANC who regard anti-retroviral drugs as a form of poison and HIV-AIDS as a new name for an old disease rooted in poverty and deprivation.
The Constitutional Court decision coincided with a sharp deterioration in the condition of Zackie Achmat, a leader of the Treatment Action Campaign who is HIV-positive. Though desperately ill with a lung infection - often fatal in the case of HIV-positive people - he vowed not to take anti-retroviral drugs until they were made available to ordinary South Africans afflicted with AIDS but too poor to pay for the drugs from their own pockets.
"We call on the government to work with us in making comprehensive HIV care a reality", Achmat said from his sick bed yesterday.
On the face of it the Constitutional Court judgment signalled rejection of another argument in the government's legal armoury: its contention that the High Court judge who ordered it to supply the Nevrapine in the first place contravened the separation-of-powers doctrine that is enshrined in the constitution. During argument before the Constitutional Court, government lawyers contended that the High Court order amounted to judicial interference with the prerogative of the executive to determine policy.
The government, which sounded a retreat from the controversial policy with a cabinet statement in mid-April, accepted its defeat in the Constitutional Court yesterday. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health, Ms Patricia Lambert, welcomed the judgment, saying that the Health Minister, Mr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, would issue a statement after studying the judgment.
In France victims' rights groups urged state prosecutors yesterday to appeal a surprise dismissal of the case against 30 doctors and government officials implicated in the use of HIV-tainted blood products in France in the mid-1980s.
Nearly 4,000 people, 1,300 of them haemophiliacs, contracted HIV or full-blown AIDS from contaminated blood they received in transfusions in the mid-1980s. Hundreds have since died.
On Thursday a Paris court threw out the case against 30 doctors and government officials placed under investigation. - (AFP)