The Durban Declaration is a statement signed by over 5,000 physicians and scientists in 2000, affirming that HIV is the cause of AIDS, seventeen years after the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
[1] The declaration was drafted in response to HIV/AIDS denialism, and particularly to address South African president Thabo Mbeki's support for AIDS denialists.
[4] Mbeki's government reportedly pressured South African scientists not to sign the document,[5] and initially dismissed the Durban declaration.
[5] Several AIDS denialists criticized the Declaration in a letter to the editor of Nature, casting the issue as an abridgement of their rights to free speech and an intolerance of "alternative" viewpoints.
[6] In response, Nature later published a letter detailing inaccurate claims made by AIDS denialists in their attacks on the Declaration,[7] and a second satirical letter from two AIDS researchers, stating: "We are staunch believers in the right to free speech, but is Nature the appropriate place to militate in favour of the pre-Copernican model of the universe or the existence of phlogiston?