TAC was launched in South Africa on 10 December 1998, International Human Rights Day, by a small group of political activists. To try to answer these questions, I examine the experience of the TAC in South Africa and attempt to draw out the approaches behind and factors influencing its activity. What ingredients are required for the successful utilization of demands for the right to health by a social movement? However, the article also analyses whether there are contextual prerequisites that will either facilitate or frustrate the use of human rights. The aim is to demonstrate that there can be successful campaigns for better health (and other socio-economic rights) that are driven by human rights demands and that take advantage of legal systems and the law. The AIDS epidemic catalyzed the formation of the TAC, an organization that started in 1998 with a handful of people and, with the assistance of the human rights framework, has grown in a decade into an internationally recognized movement. But despite the depressing down-side of AIDS, this article aims to illustrate how South Africa's growing ARV programme, estimated to be the largest in the world, and the half a million people who now have access to life saving medicine, in many ways owes its existence to a campaign for the human right to health. The governmental response to HIV has also been one of the greatest tests of South Africa's democracy and law. Death and disease caused by HIV has profound implications for human rights that are recognized in the South African Constitution, including rights to equality, dignity, access to healthcare service and education. The HIV epidemic is taking its toll on South African society.
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But even with access to medication, or knowledge of how to protect oneself from HIV infection, under the circumstances of economic and social disadvantage that characterize the lives of many women and young people in the nation, many people continue to be infected and to get ill. At least half of the people living with HIV who require treatment are not receiving it. By 2008, an estimated half a million people was receiving anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy in South Africa, but despite this the number of annual AIDS-related deaths is estimated to be between 300,000 and 400,000 – nearly a thousand deaths a day. The gravity of this epidemic is linked directly to social and sexual inequality, including the disempowerment of women, labour and refugee migration within South and Southern Africa, and ultimately the region's poverty. In South Africa, a national survey in 2007 estimated that approximately 5.4 million people are infected with HIV. Southern Africa is the region of the world most affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), … has shifted the debate firmly to one of fundamental human rights and utilized the human rights machinery established by the same government to force its hand on the ARV issue ( London, 2006: 12).
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