HIV-positive South Africans Seek Asylum in Canada

More than 130 HIV-positive South African women are seeking asylum in Canada after attending the Toronto Aids conference last month, apparently claiming that they cannot get adequate treatment at home.

The case draws more attention to the deepening controversy over whether President Thabo Mbeki's government is providing appropriate medical treatment to millions of people with Aids and HIV.

The women have not yet spoken about why they do not want to return home. But statistics show that South Africans face an uphill battle in receiving effective treatment for Aids. Some 5.5 million South Africans are HIV positive, the second largest number after India, according to the United Nations Aids organisation.

Mr Mbeki's government did not provide antiretroviral drugs to Aids patients until 2002, when South Africa's Treatment Action Campaign brought a successful legal challenge to force it to do so. The government now has more than 140,000 people on the drugs, the largest such programme in the world. A further 80,000 South Africans pay for the drugs themselves at a cost of about £150 per year.

But such figures are dwarfed by the 700,000 South Africans in urgent need of antiretroviral drugs. Critics say people are dying because the government has delayed making the drugs available.

Only last week the South African Medical Research Council announced that more than 330,000 South Africans had died of Aids in the past 12 months. About 947 South Africans die from AIDS-related deaths every day, while 1,443 become newly infected with HIV, according to a separate study also released last week.

The health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has been derided at home and abroad for advocating a diet of garlic, lemons, beetroot and the African potato as an alternative to antiretroviral drugs.

At the Toronto conference, attended by 24,000 specialists, the UN envoy on Aids, Stephen Lewis, made a scathing attack on the South African government, calling it "obtuse, dilatory and negligent about rolling out [anti-Aids] treatment". Mr Lewis attacked the Mbeki government's policies as "wrong, immoral and indefensible". He called the government's theories "more worthy of a lunatic fringe than of a concerned and compassionate state".

The South Africans applying for asylum in Canada are part of a 150-strong group with HIV who have refused to leave Canada after the conference. They are seeking refugee status to live there permanently, reported the Toronto Sun newspaper. Others seeking asylum are from El Salvador, Eritrea, Uganda and Zimbabwe, according to the newspaper.

"We are aware of a group of about 140 women seeking asylum in Canada," South Africa's foreign affairs spokesman, Ronnie Momoepa, told the Guardian yesterday, adding that South Africa is trying to verify their nationality.

Canadian officials said it may take a year for officials to rule on the cases. About one in two applications for asylum in Canada are successful.

The Eritrean Aids activist Amanuel Tesfamichael, 32, spoke of his decision to seek asylum. "I was only allowed to leave my homeland for 10 days. It feels so good to be free," he told the Toronto Sun.

Mr Tesfamichael is the founder of Eritrea's 6,000-member association for people living with Aids. He said that he was allowed to travel to Canada on condition that he surrender his passport to two government minders.