Suchergebnisse

- Nelson Mandela 'If truth is beauty, this relentlessly brilliant and hopeful book is beautiful. It is a text to live by, if we aspire to the possibility of a better life for all...in a world widely threatened by HIV/Aids.' - Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1991

This article builds on two lectures (delivered in 2017 and 2019 at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town respectively) that addressed a a controversial and often overlooked crisis in the criminal justice system – the minimum sentencing regime. The paper argues that minimum sentences are no response at all to curbing crime in South Africa and to making our people safe. The minimum sentencing regime is a misdirected, hugely costly and above all ineffective way of punishing criminals and dealing with crime. It has been an extravagant mistake of science, understanding, and policy and social response. The article summarises some of the arguments and considers why we are still stuck with minimum sentences when they are demonstrably useless and counterproductive. The author argues that the reasons lie in our broken history, in incoherent decision-making in our present political leadership, institutional incompetence, and the fact that minimum sentences themselves, through their false promise, divert us from finding more efficient solutions.

Judge Edwin Cameron (South African Supreme Court of Appeal) makes a plea for a radical change of approach and of formal health policy in relation to HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Cameron delivered this lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Forum on 4 May 2006 as part of the Ronald Louw Memorial Campaign, 'Get Tested, Get Treated'. Ronald Louw was a Professor of Law at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, an AIDS treatment activist and co-founder of the Durban Gay and Lesbian Community Centre. He died of AIDS in 2005. Cameron, who was appointed by Nelson Mandela to the high court in 1994, is a high profile AIDS activist and gay rights advocate. He has written about the experience of his decision to make public his own HIV positive status in the book, Witness to AIDS (Tafelberg).

The 26 May 2005 issue of Drum magazine, a widely-read South African monthly, featured a comparison of two deeply contrasting approaches to treating HIV. The strap-line was 'They both look the picture of health.? And they're both living with HIV/AIDS.? Yet Judge Edwin Cameron and Nozipho Bhengu each do it their way'. Bhengu, daughter of African National Congress (ANC) grandee, Ruth Bhengu (a close associate in exile of former President Thabo Mbeki), was, so the article claimed, controlling her infection and CD4 count with a nutritional concoction. 'Like [the former] health minister Manto Tshabala-Msimang', the article recorded, 'Nozipho believes there is a direct link between nutrition and AIDS'. An interview with one of the writers, Edwin Cameron, was posted alongside. Cameron explained how he was treating his HIV infection using scientifically proven antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. The article epitomised the fraught debate on HIV in South Africa at the time.

The widespread phenomenon of enacting HIV‐specific laws to criminally punish transmission of, exposure to, or non‐disclosure of HIV, is counter‐active to good public health conceptions and repugnant to elementary human rights principles. The authors provide ten reasons why criminal laws and criminal prosecutions are bad strategy in the epidemic.