A South African court on Tuesday began hearing an appeal from 13 HIV-positive prisoners demanding access to free anti-retroviral treatment in line with a government scheme launched in 2003.
Lawyers representing the prisoners from Westville jail are arguing before the High Court in Durban that a series of bureaucratic hurdles are preventing them from accessing free ARVs.
The legal move follows fruitless talks between jail authorities and the prisoners, who were were helped by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), the country’s main HIV/Aids lobby group, and the Aids Law Project (ALP) which have been campaigning for free ARVs for all HIV-positive people.
South Africa has one of the world’s biggest HIV/Aids caseloads with around one in seven people, or 6,5-million, living with HIV or Aids, according to the health ministry.
Andrea Gabriel, a lawyer for the prisoners and the TAC, told the court: ”All the applicants are, by definition, seriously ill.”
According to the ALP, 78 prisoners in Durban’s Westville jail have died of HIV/Aids since 2005.
Michelle Govender, an attorney for the ALP, said outside the court: ”It is really a matter of life and death.”
”All of them have CD4 counts of less than 200 … which means that they have a severely compromised immune system,” she said.
”All of them have shown opportunistic infections.”
About 130 000 people are receiving free ARV treatment under the scheme launched by the government at the end of 2003. – Sapa-AFP