Fatima Hassan

Fatima Hassan is a South African human rights lawyer and social justice activist. She is the founder of the Health Justice Initiative and previously served as Executive Director of the Open Society Foundation for South Africa. Quotes “Growing up I felt that the world was just unjust, and apartheid was just unfair. None of us thought that we would ever see the end of apartheid in our lifetime. Doing law was a way of trying to address some of those injustices.” Health-e News “People were dying and we were dealing with state-sponsored HIV/Aids denialism. No we weren’t just dealing with access issues. [We] were also dealing with a policy of a government that was propping up a system that was not rooted in science and evidence.” Health-e News “One of the advantages we had as young lawyers in the late 1990s is that we had a constitution that included social and economic rights, and I think this is why our legal case law trajectory looks very different to many other countries’. I worked on legal protections for people living with HIV, and part of that was taking on the pharmaceutical industry, and then taking on our government, which at the time was the Mbeki administration. Quite soon into his administration he was an HIV/AIDS denialist.” New Internationalist “We’re tired of waiting on the government to pass the amendments to patent laws, and we believe [that progress is slow] because of US trade pressure, and particularly [pressure from] European governments that have serious issues with any kind of intellectual property reforms.” New Internationalist External links Category:South African women Category:Human rights activists Category:South African lawyers Category:Living people