University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
Health Law Ethics & Policy Workshop Series
presents
Charles Ngwena
Faculty of Law of the University of the Free State, South Africa
CONCEIVING ACCESS TO HEALTH CARE AS A RIGHT: LESSONS FROM SOUTH AFRICA ON THE LIMITS OF JUSTICIABILITY
12:30 – 2:00
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
South Africa, perhaps, provides an ideal textbook environment in which to realize the promise of socio-economic rights as justiciable rights. In this regard, South Africa has the advantage of being a jurisdiction in which: the constitution is transformative; there is constitutional commitment to substantive equality; human dignity is recognized as part of equality; and the Bill of Rights includes socio-economic rights. However, these enabling features of the South African constitutional economy have yet to deliver to South Africa, an environment in which the indivisibility between civil and political rights and their socio-economic counterparts is rendered a relic of the past in terms of remedies. It is argued that an examination and analysis of how South Africa courts have, in post-apartheid South Africa, adjudicated claims relating to access to health care, show that the highest court of the land - the Constitutional Court - remains acutely sensitive to limitations in constitutional and institutional competence of the part of the judiciary as significant limitations to the adjudication of socio-economic rights. The argument is tested in three main cases that were decided by the Constitutional Court: Soobramoney v Minister of Health (1997), Government of the Republic of South Africa v Grootboom (2001) and Minister of Health v Treatment Action Campaign (2002).
Charles Ngwena LLB, LLM (Wales) is a Professor in the Department of Constitutional Law of the Faculty of Law of the University of the Free State, South Africa. He has taught and published widely on issues at the intersection between human rights, ethics and health care, including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health. In recent years, he has begun to research on disability. He serves on the editorial board of Medical Law International. He is Section Editor of Developing World Bioethics and Chief Editor of the Journal for Juridical Science. He has co-edited two books - Employment Equity Law (2001) with Professor JL Pretorius and Ms E Klink and Health and Human Rights (2007) with Professor RJ Cook. Professor Ngwena serves on a number of national and international committees, including the Scientific and Ethical Review Group of the Special Programme of Research, Development and Research Training in Human Reproduction of the World Health Organization. He directs an LLM programme on Reproductive and Sexual Rights which he initiated in 2005.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please go to our website at http://www.law.utoronto.ca/healthlaw/ or contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
