Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Sunday Times (Johannesburg) - October 6, 2002
Carmel Rickard
Speaking after being honoured with a top human rights award by the English Bar in London on Friday night, Judge Edwin Cameron of the Appeal Court said that both the denial of Aids, in its African form, and the denial of the Holocaust in which millions of Jews were killed, were based on a belief in "racial conspiracy".
In terms of this conspiracy theory, African Aids deniers claimed that well-established facts about Aids were "a monstrous plot against Africans because they are black" and that a syndicate of white Western interests promoted antiretroviral drugs to "degrade, exploit and kill Africans".
Judge Cameron said that the question of Holocaust denial had been fought out in the courts in England when right-wing British historian David Irving claimed that those who called him a "Holocaust denier'" had libelled him.
The result was a conclusive verdict on the subject, dismissing the libel claim and finding that those who persist in Holocaust denial "are devoid of professional integrity or truth".
Similarly, "South Africa's own monstrous denial of truth" has also been the subject of judicial scrutiny, said the judge.
In the face of "mountainous evidence" that Aids exists and is ravaging the region, it would seem impossible that the existence of the epidemic and the threat it posed to the lives of millions of Africans and to African civilisation could be doubted.
"And yet it is. The significance for our country of this denial is momentous. It has to be, since our President has . . . officially encouraged it."
In the same way as the court in England had dealt a blow to Holocaust denial, South Africa's highest court, the Constitutional Court, had exposed Aids denial by handing down a judgment dealing with state discrimination against a work-seeker with HIV.
Similarly, the court dealt with the government's refusal to introduce a national programme to combat the transmission of HIV from pregnant mothers to their babies.
The court's decisions made it clear that "irrationality and obfuscation" had no place in South Africa's response to the worst threat to its national life and indicated to the government a direction which, if followed, would lead to the "effective and coherent national response" to the epidemic that until now has been "so tragically lacking".
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