JOHANNESBURG, Sept 13 (AFP) - A South African AIDS lobby group is taking President Thabo Mbeki's government to court to force it to make public its targets and timetable for rolling out free anti-retrovirals, a lawyer said Monday.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), which won a landmark ruling ordering the government to offer free anti-AIDS drugs to pregnant women in mid-2002, is to present its case to the Pretoria High Court on November 2, lawyer Fatima Hassan said.
"We are basically going to court to demand the release of an (annexed document) to the government's ARV national rollout plan which details timelines and patient targets," said Hassan.
"It's a public document and since February we have been trying to get the government to release it," she told AFP.
South Africa has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world with UNAIDS estimating that 5.3 million people, or one in every nine, are infected.
Mbeki's government started the year with the continent's biggest and most ambitious AIDS treatment programmes.
But a few months later, only around 10,000 AIDS sufferers were getting free drugs.
Cabinet announced in November 2003 that it had approved a national treatment plan for AIDS sufferers that would be accessible to 53,000 people by March of this year.
But the government only started the rollout in April.
Mbeki said earlier government hoped to reach the target by March next year although AIDS activists are skeptical that it will be reached.
The programme was also hampered by a shortage of drugs as the pharmaceutical industry battled to keep up with demands.
Hospitals participating in the national ARV roll-out programme were told by the health ministry to make sure they had enough supplies before enrolling new patients.
The looming legal clash is the latest in a long line of showdowns between government and the TAC.
In mid-2002 South Africa's Constitutional Court forced government to give ARV's to all HIV-positive pregnant women, following a case brought by the TAC in 2001.
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