Aids prisoners ready for new battle

Reports that HIV-positive prisoners at Durban’s Westville Correctional Centre are receiving inadequate HIV/Aids therapy have caused a stir.

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the South African Human Rights Commission (HRC) disclosed last week that they had received reports from prison inmates detailing their plight.

Promise Makhanya, the TAC’s KwaZulu-Natal treatment project coordinator, said some prisoners at Westville are receiving antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. But the facility is not providing proper nutrition and lacks treatment for opportunistic infections and tuberculosis. Inmates allege discrimination when seeking medical assistance, Makhanya said.

‘Prisoners are angry and want us to go back to court,” said Makhanya.

The HRC’s provincial manager, Tanuja Munnoo, said it intervened to ensure an HIV-positive prisoner was treated. It appeared that somewhere along the line the treatment programme got derailed, said Munnoo.

The Aids Law Project’s (ALP) Jonathan Berger said the framework had, after negotiations between the ALP, TAC and departments of health and correctional services, been close to finalisation in March. But the deal was ‘scuppered” after the state’s legal department intervened.

The situation now could be traced back to an impasse over a reading of the judgement passed by Judge Thumba Pillay in the Durban High Court in June last year on an application brought by the ALP on behalf of 15 treatment-seeking HIV-positive inmates at Westville against prison authorities and government.

Pillay ordered HIV/Aids treatment be provided to the applicants ‘with immediate effect”.

The government appealed against the court order, which was dismissed by Judge Chris Nicholson, who ordered authorities to provide the court with details of its treatment programme.

The TAC and ALP had at the time found the programme, which focused solely on ARV roll-out, ‘wanting”.

Highlighting government’s ‘narrow understanding” of the order, Berger said: ‘It failed to understand the relationship between the provision of ARV treatment and other essential interventions.

‘Concerns include: the identification of prisoners at Westville in need of ARV treatment; regular HIV and CD4 count testing; the treatment of opportunistic infections; adequate nutrition, the timing of meals and the so-called wellness programme; HIV prevention interventions; cooperation between government departments involved and their roles; internal monitoring and evaluation; and independent assessment of the implementation of the plan.”

A task team comprising role players was set up early this year to negotiate the settlement. A draft national framework was tabled eventually.

The ALP’s Adila Hassim said Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka had issued a directive to resolve the matter before November 28.

Thabang Chiloane, spokesperson for Mlambo-Ng cuka, said the deputy president was ‘concerned about the pushing back of gains from the past few months and anything which may derail the good work which has been done [in reconciling the sometimes antagonistic role-players in the South African HIV/Aids landscape]”.

The department of correctional services had not responded to questions at the time of going to press.