Following the demise of apartheid, human rights in South Africa are now constitutionally enshrined.The right to health in South Africa's Constitution has been credited with transforming the lives of millions of people by triggering programmatic reforms in HIV treatment and the prevention of mother to child transmission (MTCT) of HIV.However, a constitutionally enshrined right to health offers no guarantee that clinical trial participants will enjoy post-trial access to beneficial interventions. Using access to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in South Africa as an example, this paper argues that adherence to bioethics norms could realize the right to health for trial participants following the end of a clinical trial.
Copyright 2015 Singh. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.