The Cape High Court on Friday ruled for the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) in its application for an interdict against vitamin entrepreneur Matthias Rath.
The HIV/Aids lobby group was seeking to stop Rath and his Dr Rath Foundation from claiming the TAC was acting as a front for the multinational pharmaceutical industry by promoting anti-retroviral drugs for people living with HIV/Aids.
When the case was argued before a full bench in June last year, TAC’s advocate Geoff Budlender argued that the Rath’s public attacks on the TAC were based on nothing more than crude conspiracy theory.
Rath had failed to produce ”any evidence whatsoever” to support the core claim that TAC was a drug industry front and received funding from it, he said.
On the contrary, eight witnesses had proved in affidavits that since its inception in 1998 the TAC had insisted on political and financial independence from the industry.
Reserving judgement until June 21, judge Siraj Desai said it would take ”several weeks” for him and his two colleagues to formulate their findings.
The court also ordered Rath to stop publishing statements accusing the TAC of acting as a front for pharmaceutical companies.
”The limited restraint on free speech, resulting from the order I make, is not directed to stop the respondents from participating in a debate of immense public importance,” Desai wrote in a judgement.
”The restraint is directed at the manner in which the respondents have chosen to participate in the debate and the methods they chose to employ,” Desai continued.
With Judges Louw and Moosa concurring, he wrote that the order was imposed to ensure that the TAC’s continued participation in the debate was not hamstrung by defamatory and unfounded allegations of undue intimacy with the pharmaceutical industry.
The TAC application related to the ”boisterous” and, at times, ”unseemly” debate on the efficacy of anti-retroviral treatment for those suffering from HIV/Aids.
”In the light of the scale of the pandemic and its frighteningly severe consequences, this discord is unsettling,” Desai found.
Earlier on Friday, as he waiting for the court to convene, TAC executive member Zackie Achmat expressed frustration at the time it had taken for the judges to deliver their ruling.
”It’s very sad this matter has taken nearly a year to decide, and I’m worried about how the courts are administered,” he said.
”If this was a woman waiting for an order against her [abusive] husband, she would be half-dead by now.”
The TAC says Rath’s staff have been conducting unauthorised pseudo-medical experiments on township dwellers.
Rath, on the other hand, who has the tacit backing of Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, claims his vitamins can ”control” and ”reverse” HIV/Aids, an assertion dismissed by mainstream medical experts. – Sapa