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.
Dying for treatment
TAC Briefing Document on the Civil Disobedience campaign
March 2003
This Briefing document is intended to help TAC activists and supporters to understand the background to TAC's decision to embark on a civil disobedience campaign in March 2003. Hundreds of pages could be written about TAC's efforts to persuade government to work with civil society on an HIV/AIDS treatment programme - but this is just a summary. In addition, although there is a great deal of independent research and information that could be cited to support TAC's demands, in this document we refer only to government's own research and policy statements to show how, in reality, the reluctance to commit to a treatment plan, including antiretroviral (ARV) medicines, contradicts its own findings, policies and constitutional duties.
1. What are TAC's two main demands?