“We should seek to ensure that the South African voice is clearly heard until this ruling is made and our call to the rest of humanity to take a stand against discriminatory practices and subtle racism, wherever and whenever it rears its ugly head,” Sport and Recreation Minister Tokozile Xasa said on Saturday.
The #NaturallySuperior campaign is a rally for a bid by the country’s World and 800m Olympics champion Semenya who is appealing the hyperandrogenism regulations, which have been targeted against her running career, as introduced by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF).
The athletics governing body’s “racist” regulations seek to force Semenya and three other African female athletes to drug themselves in order to reduce the levels of testosterone in their bodies or be forced to compete with men.
The regulations were originally scheduled to come into effect in November 2018 but were delayed after Semenya lodged an appeal against them with a Swiss court.
Xasa said Pretoria opposed these regulations as they sought to punish athletes who are endowed with physical traits, attributes and abilities, naturally, and subject them to medical procedures that seek to alter who they are.
“We believe that this is tantamount to modernising barbarism and is indeed an attempt at civilising cruelty as well as making discriminatory practices acceptable in a world that should be steeped in a human rights culture,” she said.
The South African government appointed a high-level panel to coordinate Semenya’s response to these regulations and the work was divided into three work streams — namely the medical, the legal and the social mobilisation.
The teams presented the case to the Court for Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne, Switzerland last week. It is expected that the CAS will give its ruling at the end of March 2019.