SOUTH AFRICA: The South African government has barred the country's leading Aids lobby group from attending a UN conference on the disease - a move that has drawn domestic and international condemnation.
Treatment Action Campaign (Tac) and its affiliate, the Aids Law Project, have been told by UN officials that their accreditation for the event has been withdrawn due to pressure from the ANC government.
Hundreds of non-governmental organisations are due to converge on New York for the UN general assembly special session on Aids, which is scheduled for May 31st to June 2nd.
While Minister for Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was tight-lipped about the controversy yesterday, the director-general of her department, Thami Mseleku, said the decision was based on the lobby group's history of trying to embarrass her.
"We would like to present a united voice at the conference, but past experience has taught us that they [ Tac] use such platforms to rubbish what we are doing to tackle the problem," Mr Mseleku told local media.
The UN's special envoy on Aids to Africa, Stephen Lewis, expressed outrage at the decision, describing Tac as "the single most credible non-governmental Aids organisation in the world".
In a separate development, Namibia banned its leading Aids lobby groups from attending the UN conference, which is aimed at getting world governments to reaffirm their commitment to a 2001 declaration on the disease.
The credibility of the event is now being called into question, given the emphasis placed in the declaration on government partnerships with civil society.
Tac spokesman Nathan Geffen said the root problem behind its ban was the ANC government's "pseudo-scientific" approach to Aids. He said President Thabo Mbeki was right to highlight the manner in which Africans were racially stereotyped in the western media, "but that does not justify throwing out the entire HIV epidemic and claiming it as a conspiracy".
He said it had reached a stage where President Mbeki "clearly does not believe HIV causes Aids".
The group's relationship with the government has been deteriorating since 2003 when it initiated a legal action over the health minister's failure to distribute anti-retroviral drugs.
Last November, it named both Ms Tshabalala-Msimang and Mr Mseleku in a high court action against the continued operation of a "herbal" Aids treatment clinic in Cape Town.
In a preparatory document for the UN conference, Ms Tshabalala-Msimang says the rate of HIV infection is slowing down in South Africa - although the figures to back up this claim have yet to be released. Between five and six million South Africans have been infected with HIV.