South Africa: Right to health Minister of Health v Treatment Action Campaign40 The South African HIV/AIDS activist organisation, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), along with a concerned doctor and the Children’s Rights Centre, sued the South African Ministry of Health for not making drugs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV widely available to the population. In that year alone, around one quarter of a million people died in South Africa of AIDS-related causes. The then-President had publicly expressed the view that HIV did not cause AIDS, and was supported by the Minister of Health. In examining TAC’s claims, the Court looked to the South African Constitution, which grants the right of all citizens to public health care and the right of children ‘to be afforded special protection’. Sections 27 and 28 of the Constitution provide that: 27(1) Everyone has the right to have access to (a) health care services, including reproductive health care … (2) The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of each of these rights … 28(1) Every child has the right … (c) to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services. In light of these provisions, the Court found that the government had not taken reasonable steps to reduce the risk of mother to child transmission of HIV at birth, both because: (1) the government did not make the antiretroviral drug Nevirapine available to HIV-positive mothers and at-risk newborns even when ordered or prescribed by doctors, and (2) the government had not set out a timeframe for creating a national program to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. The Court ordered the government to: • Remove restrictions that prevented most public hospitals from making Nevirapine available to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission of HIV; • ‘Permit and facilitate the use of Nevirapine’, and make Nevirapine available where medically indicated; • take ‘reasonable measures’ to expand testing and counselling facilities at public hospitals and clinics ‘to facilitate and expedite the use of Nevirapine’. Extracted from: CRIN Legal Library.41 (b) The case for implementing ICESCR rights in Australia ICESCR is one of three core international instruments, alongside the ICCPR and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), that make up the ‘International Bill of Rights’.42 The UDHR, the first of the three instruments, 124 includes both civil and political rights; and economic, social and cultural rights. The split between economic, social and cultural rights and civil and political rights within the subsequent treaties, was a product of Cold War politics, with the East and West each preferring to emphasise a different set of rights based on their economies and histories.43 It remains the