sued<\/a>\u00a0the government for refusing to provide them with free ARVs, while providing them at no cost to Botswana citizens.<\/p>\nThe prisoners said the government had denied them “the right to life” and that they deserved “freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, discrimination, and inequality”.<\/p>\n
Sechele said the government’s decision to exclude Tapela and Piye as well as other inmates from ARV was “irrational and invalid”.<\/p>\n
The judge also ruled that the government should pay for the legal fee for the two inmates.<\/p>\n
The Botswana Network on Ethics, Law and HIV\/AIDS (BONELA) had supported the challenge against government policy, saying it violated the prisoners’ constitutional right to equality, dignity and non-discrimination.<\/p>\n
The High Court agreed, rejecting the government’s claim that it did not have adequate funds to provide non-citizen detainees with the treatment.<\/p>\n
BONELA director Cindy Kelemi welcomed the ruling, calling it a victory for human rights.<\/p>\n
“The court affirmed that providing ARV treatment to all prisoners who need it is critical to effectively addressing HIV,” she said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Source: Aljazeera<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Botswana’s High Court has ordered the government to provide treatment to HIV-positive foreign prisoners at the state’s expense. Justice Bengbame Sechele ruled on Friday that the denial of anti-retroviral (ARV) treatment to foreign inmates violated their rights. Dickson Tapela and Mbuso Piye, two Zimbabwean prisoners had\u00a0sued\u00a0the government for refusing to provide them with free ARVs, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":41484,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-41483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}