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Does AIDS exist? Is HIV actually a virus? Incredibly, not everyone says yes. But never before has a scientific theory on HIV been tested like this in a court of law. In this landmark SA case, the verdict will decide if a man convicted of infecting his girlfriend with the virus can walk free. Hendrik Gout reports.

TWENTY years ago Andre Chad Parenzee arrived in South Australia from Cape Town, South Africa. He was just 15 years old as he settled into his strange new country. He went to school. He grew up. He become a chef and settled in Port Pirie, the state's fourth-largest city, known less for its fine restaurants than its lead smelters and industrial plants. The future looked good -- until 1998, when he had a blood test.

He was told he carried the human immunodeficiency virus, commonly called HIV.

He told his fiancée he had cancer, and she believed him. They married. He often had sex with her, unprotected sex, knowing he had been diagnosed with the virus. And then he had sex with two other women.

Of course, he had a reason, which was good enough for him. "It was just the fact that I didn't know how she would react to me telling her. I thought she would leave me like everyone else," he said.

And leave him she eventually did, because Parenzee's secret stayed secret no more. It happened after one of the three women had her blood tested as well. To her horror, she found she now also carried signs of the virus. In came the Director of Public Prosecutions. In came the Supreme Court. And in came the jury's verdict: "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" to three counts of endangering lives. Fifteen years, went the judge's gavel.

That was last year. This year, Parenzee, 35, is arguing for leave to appeal on the grounds that AIDS doesn't exist, and that neither does HIV. So if it doesn't exist he should be free to walk and continue to have sex - without warning his partners. Parenzee sits impassively in the dock, staring into the middle distance, stroking his goatee. If the chef understands the scientific arguments raging around him -- and because of him - about retroviruses, blots, mathematical deviations, and statistics, then his face doesn't show it.

This is believed to be the first case in any jurisdiction, in any court, in any country, where AIDS itself is on trial.

That's why the eyes of the world are now on the handsome sandstone Court of Criminal Appeal in central Adelaide, where a red-robed, horsehair wigged-judge, His Honour John Sulan, is deciding whether there is enough scientific controversy about the existence of HIV and AIDS to give Parenzee another shot at freedom.

Now it may seem that 25 million dead are some sort of proof. That's how many people are alleged to have died of AIDS-related causes in the past 25 years. And the toll keeps rising exponentially. It's now three million a year, victims of what could be the greatest mass epidemic of all time. Could all these corpses really be lying?

Yes, say experts. Not all experts, of course, but enough to occupy the witness box at District Court for the past week. That's right -- experts arguing in a court of law that unprotected vaginal intercourse with a suspected HIV carrier is safe. In fact, the climax of Tuesday's testimony was an exchange between prosecutor Sandi McDonald and defence witness Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos. "Would you have unprotected vaginal sex with a HIV-positive man?" asked McDonald. "Any time," replied Papadopulos-Eleopulos.

 (Suite)