After it was found that 94 psychiatric patients died after being transferred from Life Esidimeni, various stakeholders have been called into question by the Democratic Alliance (DA).
The major opposition party is now saying the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) could have saved lives if it had acted seriously on the complaint made in March, 2016.
According to Jack Bloom, DA Shadow MEC for Health in the Gauteng Provincial Legislature, Annie Robb from Ubuntu Centre, an organisation for people with psycho-social disabilities, wrote to Bokankatla Malatji, the SAHRC Commissioner on 15 March, 2016 requesting that attention be given to a potential violation of rights. The violation was said to be perpetrated by the Gauteng Health Department on psychiatric patients at Esidimeni. In the request she stated the matter needed immediate urgent attention.
Robb told Bloom the SAHRC allegedly did nothing and barely remembered the issue at a July meeting of the Section 11 Disability Committee meeting.
“It was only on 24 August, 2016 that she was phoned by an SAHRC legal officer to say they would assign a number to her complaint, and she told him ‘people are going to die if you do nothing’.”
A month later, the SAHRC combined her complaint with a complaint concerning the Precious Angels NGO which had received a number of Esidimeni patients. When the SAHRC later visited the NGO, the site was found abandoned.
Bloom said the site was only visited after former Gauteng Health MEC, Quedani Mahlangu, had disclosed 36 deaths and the Health Ombudsman was appointed to investigate.
Bloom further claims Professor Michael Stein, the Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, resigned in protest from the Section 11 Disability Committee.
“He wrote in an angry email to Robb in October that ‘The SAHRC was put on advance notice by you and your group in March and even by me in person in March 2016 about the deadly and inevitable results that would happen if they stood by and did not act, and yet they chose to do nothing’,” Bloom said.
He further said the human rights of the 94 dead patients were ignored by too many people, including the Human Rights Commission – which could have prevented the deaths if they had acted determinedly in March last year –and calls into question the SAHRC’s competence to conduct a country-wide investigation into human rights compliance in mental heath treatment as recommended by the Health Ombudsman.
It is hugely disappointing that the SAHRC, and Commissioner Malatji in particular, failed to act speedily to save the lives of the most vulnerable patients imperiled by their reckless transfer to unsuitable NGOs.
“The DA will insist that the SAHRC accounts for its inexcusable inaction to Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Justice and Correctional Services,” Bloom said.
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