[Ip-health] Lisa Forman: Rights and Drug Trade Rules

[Aidan Hollis]

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Interesting paper:

'Rights' and Wrongs: What Utility for the Right to Health in Reforming
Trade Rules on Medicines?
Lisa Forman, U of Toronto

Abstract:
This paper explores the legal and normative potential of the right to
health to mitigate the restrictive impact of trade-related
intellectual property rules on access to medicines, as evidenced by
the global outcomes of the seminal pharmaceutical company litigation
in South Africa in 2001. I argue that the litigation and resulting
public furor provoked a paradigm shift in global approaches to AIDS
treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. I argue further that this outcome
illustrates how human rights in concert with social action were able
to effectively challenge dominant claims about the necessity of
stringent trade-related intellectual property rights in poor
countries, and ergo, to raise the priority of public health needs in
related decision-making. I explore the causal role of rights in
achieving these outcomes through the analytical lens provided by
international legal compliance theories, and in particular, the model
of normative emergence proposed by Martha Finnemore and Kathryn
Sikkink. I suggest that the AIDS medicines experience offers strategic
guidance for realizing the right to health's transformative potential
with regard to essential medicines more generally.

  available at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1353221

Aidan Hollis
Professor of Economics

University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW Calgary AB T2N 1N4 Canada
tel: +1 403 220 5861  fax: +1 403 220 5861
email: ahollis@ucalgary.ca
web: http://econ.ucalgary.ca/hollis.htm

Incentives for Global Health
http://www.healthimpactfund.org