The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has turned down an invitation to be part of the South African delegation at next month’s special United Nations session on HIV/Aids.
In a letter to Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, released to the media on Thursday, TAC general secretary Sipho Mthathi said the process of selecting and announcing the delegation had been unsatisfactory.
”For the TAC to now attend within this delegation lends respectability to a process that we feel has mostly been unilateral and non-transparent,” she said.
The TAC protested vigorously when it was initially omitted from the delegation, reportedly on the grounds that it had in the past denigrated President Thabo Mbeki and his government.
When the department last week issued a list of invitees that included Mthathi, apparently in her personal capacity, the TAC responded that she would go only if the Aids Law Project was also put on the list.
The department rejected this demand on Wednesday.
Mthathi said in her letter to the minister that the entire way the government had handled the UN review process was unsatisfactory.
”I do not feel that civil society has been adequately respected in the process,” she said. ”The issue began with the way in which the South African report has been developed, with very little civil-society input.
”Later, the delegation to this meeting was handpicked by government, and there was no space for civil-society actors to choose their representatives … A civil society selected for its favour with government is not, by definition, civil society.”
She said that participating in the country delegation on the basis of an individual invitation would for her be tantamount to denouncing her mandate as an elected member of the TAC’s national executive committee.
”On this basis, I will look forward to attending [the UN session] within a separate capacity, under the invite of other partners, and engaging constructively and critically where necessary with government and other partners.” — Sapa