A decade of fighting for our lives.

• Author: Dubula, Vuyiseka
• Position: South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign

A group of South African activists founded the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) on 10 December 1998, International Human Rights Day. It was no accident that TAC was formed exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The backbone of TAC is its use of advocacy to fight for the realisation of the right to health, which is enshrined both in international treaties and in the South African Constitution.

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At the time when TAC was formed, South Africa was falling into a health crisis. Today, more than 5 million South Africans are infected with HIV, and 1500 are newly infected each day. Approximately 2.5 million deaths occurred between 1990 and 2008. South Africa also faced an escalating tuberculosis (TB) epidemic, as well as growing epidemics of multi- and extremely-drug resistant TB. During this time, maternal and child mortality also reached a crisis point.

During its first decade, TAC focused on challenging government health policies that were not evidence-based and were putting multinational profits above people. In the beginning, TAC struggled to secure access to particular medicines for poor people who could not afford them. Its members saw that while many poor people in developing countries were not able to access lifesaving treatment, people living with HIV in richer countries were benefiting from these medications. TAC tried to engage with pharmaceutical companies, encouraging them to be transparent in how they came up with the prices they were charging. However, few companies were willing to disclose this information, because it would have revealed how they made millions of dollars in profits in countries like South Africa at the expense of the poor, who continued to die from treatable and manageable diseases.

TAC forged solidarity partnership with activists in Brazil, India, Thailand, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Together, it created a global movement to fight drug company profiteering by challenging the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, and its application in developing countries with significant HIV, TB, or malaria epidemics. TAC went to court to challenge the patents of multinationals such as Pfizer in South Africa for their exorbitant price of essential drugs like Fluconazole.

TAC challenged patents that allowed drug companies to sell essential medicines without competition and earning enormous profits...