South Africa

400 people who had been evicted from adjacent municipal land settled on the private Modderklip farm in 2000. In April 2001 an eviction order was issued, but the occupiers had no place to go and failed to comply.  The numbers of occupiers continued to increase and the sheriff demanded a deposit of 1.8 million rand – more than the land was worth to carry out the eviction.   

South Africa is in the midst of an HIV/AIDS epidemic with more than 6 million people infected.    In 2,000, with infections of newborns in the range of 80,000 per year, the anti-retroviral drug Nevirapine offered the potential of preventing the infection of 30 – 40,000 children per year.  The drug was offered to the Government for free for five years, but the South African Government announced it would introduce Mother-To-Child-Transmission (MTCT) only in certain pilot sites and would delay setting these up for a year, thereby denying most mothers access to treatment.  The Treatment Action

The applicants were permanent residents in South Africa. They challenged legislative provisions, which limited entitlement to social grants for the aged to South African citizens, and would prevent children of non-South African citizens in the same position as the applicants from claiming any of the childcare grants available to South African children (regardless of the citizenship-status of the children themselves).