AIDS group's legal costs paid by government

The South African AIDS NGO, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), has welcomed a high court judgment awarding it limited legal costs for its application to gain access to certain department of health documents. TAC has been struggling with the health department since February over the release of "Annexure A", an unpublished document believed to contain detailed timetables of the government's anti-AIDS treatment plan. After months of legal wrangling and failure by government to make the document public, TAC requested the court to order health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang to pay the costs of the case. The South African Broadcasting Corporation quoted TAC lawyer Fatima Hassan as saying: "It sends a very strong signal to the department of health, as well as other organs of state, to act in a constitutional manner, which basically means they can't ignore requests for access to information."