Why the TAC is Going to Court Tomorrow and Holding Country-Wide Demonstrations

This is an archive of the Treatment Action Campaign's public documents from December 1998 until October 2008. I created this website because the TAC's website appears unmaintained and people were concerned that it
was becoming increasingly hard to find important documents.

The menu items have been slightly edited and a new stylesheet applied to the site. But none of the documents have been edited, not even for minor errors. The text appears on this site as obtained from the Internet Archive.

The period covered by the archive encompassed the campaign for HIV medicines, the civil disobedience campaigns, the Competition Commission complaints, the 2008 xenophobic violence and the PMTCT, Khayelitsha health workers and Matthias Rath court cases.

Why the TAC is Going to Court Tomorrow and Holding Country-Wide Demonstrations

On 19 November 2003, the Cabinet announced the Operational Plan on Comprehensive Care and Treatment for HIV and AIDS (Operational Plan). This plan gave hope to millions of people with HIV because it committed government to:

After the Plan was agreed to by Cabinet many health workers and health officials made a great effort to make the programme a success. In Gauteng and the Western Cape thousands of people now benefit from access to treatment. But overall the programme has been rolled out very slowly. The Operational Plan committed to treating over 50,000 people by March 2004. But, by October 2004, less than 15,000 people were being treated in public hospitals and clinics.

It is important that ordinary citizens are able to help government with the implementation of the Operational Plan and that they can hold government accountable. But this can only be done properly if we know the dates when clinics and hospitals will begin treatment, the number of people that each clinic or hospital will be able to treat and how many additional health-care workers each clinic or hospital will hire to help implement the programme.

Since November 2003 the Operational Plan has referred to a document which contains most of this information; it is called Annexure A. This document has still not been made public.

The TAC requested Annexure A from the Minister of Health on 20 February 2004 because we believed this to be the implementation timetable. It is our right to have this information. The South African Constitution says anyone has the right of access to any information held by the state. But eight months later, the Minister has not released the implementation timetable.

The TAC also wrote letters to the ANC and to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health asking them to intervene so that we would not have to take the Minister of Health to court to get the implementation timetable. But the Minister still refused.

As a last resort, the TAC decided to take the Minister of Health to court to compel her to make the implementation plan, which we understood to be Annexure A, available. After the TAC led court papers on 18 June 2004, the Department opposed the case and only in September 2004 responded for the first time through an affidavit stating that Annexure A is a draft document that was never officially adopted. According to the Department all references to Annexure A in the Operational Plan, were errors that they forgot to correct.

This was very surprising to the TAC because since February 2004 we were led to believe that the implementation plan was Annexure A. There are many references to Annexure A in the Operational Plan. Also, it has been nearly a year since the Operational Plan was adopted by Cabinet and this is the first time that the Department said that Annexure A was only a draft and that all references to it in the Operational Plan were errors.

(1) a new implementation timetable for the Operational Plan has been developed, in which case government is Constitutionally obligated to make it available, or

(2) no implementation timetable exists, in which case government has a Constitutional obligation to develop one.

1. On 4 November we will ask the Pretoria High Court to award us all the legal costs for taking this case so far because it took government so long to inform us that Annexure A was a draft. But in our court papers we explain that the cost is not only about money, but about people's lives. Every delay by government results in people dying before they get access to treatment.

2. In six provinces, TAC members will demonstrate that they want access to life-saving information. For many people who need treatment and want to know when and where it will be available, the right to know is important for their

3. Our lawyers will still ask the department for the final implementation timetable.

a. If the department has an implementation timetable but refuses to provide it, we will ask the courts to compel it to make it available because the Constitution guarantees the right to access to information.

b. If there is no timetable, we will ask the courts to compel the Minister of Health to develop one because the Constitution guarantees our rights to life, dignity and healthcare. Also, the Operational Plan cannot be implemented properly without an implementation timetable.

The Minister can stop all legal action against her and her department by simply making the implementation timetable publicly available. Demand the Right to Know. Join TAC events in Pretoria, Cape Town, East London, Polokwane, Nelspruit and Durban on 4 November.

Pretoria: Meet at Church Square, Pretoria at 9am for a march to the Pretoria High Court