2022-01-26 Caritas Care   Ockert Pretorius has passed away :-(

2022-01-26 VIR-576: New HIV drug offers hope.

2020-03-19 Statistics and facts about AIDS in South Africa

2020-03-19 Statistics and facts about women and girls

2013-05-25 www.cabsa.co.za   training@cabsa.org.za , Wellington, 021-873 0028, 011-796 6830, Christian Aidsburo for South Africa

2009-11-04 AIDS is so bad in Pretoria ... ... they don’t use condoms anymore; they use hosepipes.

2004-03-10 AIDS research... ... They now use lawyers (in South Africa, some advocates) instead of rats for research experiments. There is no shortage, you don’t get so attached to them and there are some things a rat just won’t do.

2004-01-31 Should the transmission of HIV should be made a crime, because for the receiver it is a death sentence?

Proposals made to the South African Law Reform Commission in its report on the new Sexual Offences Act:

The mere transmission of HIV should be made a crime of rape.

• the intentional non-disclosure of one’s HIV-positive status,
• negligence of one’s HIV status

• Johnny de Lange, African National Congress MP and chair of the committee on justice and constitutional development. At present the committee is discussing amendments to the Sexual Offences Act.
• University of Cape Town Dean of Law Professor Jonathan Burchell, criminal law expert Professor PJ Schwikkard, Acting Justice of Appeal Belinda van Heerden and Justice Eberhard Bertelsmann.

The intentional transmission of HIV should be made a crime of rape.

• where a person was tricked into agreeing to sex,
• a person who is HIV-positive and engages in unprotected sex is guilty of rape, but if condoms are used carefully, it can no longer be considered to be a crime.

No new legislation should be introduced to regulate the disclosure of the HIV-status of people having consensual sex.

• HIV-specific statutory offences will have no or little practical utility as any occurrences can be sorted out by common law (attempted murder).
• Introducing a new crime will add to problems of an already overburdened criminal justice system.
• There are few or no prosecutions under existing criminal measures.
• It would be almost impossible to prove that an accused was aware of his or her HIV status - as this should be totally confidential.
• The social costs involved in making negligent transmission of HIV is not justifiable. It would not be right to punish people for their failure to know their HIV status.
• It would make the stigmatisation of people with HIV worse. Most women know their HIV status. Most women are also infected by men who do not know their status. "These women then suffer abandonment, rejection and violence on disclosing their HIV status to the male partners who infected them in the first place.
• It would infringe on the right to privacy to an extent that is not justified.
• It would have no impact on diminishing or preventing the spread of HIV.

• Supreme Court of Appeal Judge Edwin Cameron.
• Helen Alexander from the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Trust

• The National Prosecuting Authority’s special sexual offences unit, because common law was not wide enough to ensure the effective prosecution of this. The statutory crime should include all potentially lethal sexually transmitted diseases.

What the courts decided

The first case was that of Lucas Nyalunga.Nyalunga raped a 26-year-old woman last year.He admitted at the time that he knew he was HIV-positive and confirmed he had received treatment for this for a lengthy period.Apart from the crime of raping her, he did not use protection before raping the woman and thus wilfully infected her.

Judge Eben Jordaan sentenced him to jail for life after his convictions of attempted murder and rape were confirmed by the Pretoria High Court.

The judge said the Criminal Procedure Act was sufficient to deal with this type of scenario, i.e. no new laws have to be made to cover cases where an accused wilfully infected his victim.

This page has been updated on the 2022-02-14.