‘We should think very carefully about whether criminalising the spread of the coronavirus will help or hurt South Africans as we battle the outbreak,’ writes Safura Abdool Karim, a senior researcher and health lawyer at PRICELESS SA, the SA Medical Research Council Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science.
Writing on the Daily Maverick site, Karim notes that a salon owner in Ladysmith faces 10 years in jail after being charged with attempted murder for intentionally spreading the coronavirus – he exposed 27 people to the virus following his refusal to quarantine himself after testing positive.
Karim argues that South African law on disease transmission was ‘cemented’ when the High Court convicted a man, known in court papers as Nyalangu, for attempted murder after he intentionally infected a woman with HIV. At the time, HIV treatment was not accessible to most South Africans and the virus was effectively a death sentence for many people.
But by 2013, when the country convicted a second man for the same crime, South Africa had more than 100,000 people in treatment. Karim points out that both these convictions hinged on the fact that the courts could prove that the men were aware of their HIV-positive status – the first requirement for successful prosecution.
“Because of this, doctors and activists feared that people would stop being tested. After all, if people didn’t know their status, the courts couldn’t convict them.” She says in 2018, 20 leading international HIV scientists released a statement saying that laws criminalising HIV were not in the interest of public health and many were also not backed by science.
They noted that legislation such as this also contributed to stigma by discriminating against HIV-positive persons. Says Karim: “The role of testing in the prevention of Covid-19 is even more critical because there are no treatments. In criminalising the spread of the new coronavirus, South Africa runs the risk of repeating past mistakes that may only deter people from getting tested for SARS-Cov-2 in order to avoid potential prosecution. The use of such laws during the outbreak may also compound the socio-economic and gendered vulnerabilities faced by many in our country.”
[link url="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-04-06-can-you-really-be-convicted-of-attempted-murder-if-you-infect-someone-with-the-coronavirus/"]Full analysis on the Daily Maverick site[/link]