When framing meets law: Using human rights as a practical instrument to facilitate access to medicines in developing countries

2014 ◽  
pp. 12-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Matthews
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Meads

<p>Restrictive provisions in international trade agreements, particularly trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), are impeding access to essential medicines in developing countries, making medicines unaffordable to poor people. The extent to which trade restrictions have adverse effects on health and economic development in Fiji and the Pacific region may depend critically on how Pacific Island Countries cope with the forces of regionalism and the realities of joining the global trading system, where there are pressures to make concessions in TRIPS. Yet awareness is relatively low. A central question to be asked here is what underlying factors shape how Pacific islanders view trade and access to medicines, notably in the area of trade, health, local culture, and human rights and what are the regional and national responses to mitigate potential trade impediments. By combining a public health lens with a multi-sector review of population health trends, intellectual property rights law, trade policymaking, and human rights, this research elaborates multidisciplinary findings that are usually less evident because they are conventionally researched and managed on a sector-by-sector basis. The findings suggest human rights are less significant in this debate, with challenges associated with small island developing states, local cultural preferences and pressures from regionalism, having more of a direct influence. The combined effect of these factors may be creating a unique context that is leading the Pacific region not to deal with these issues as well as some other developing countries might. This paper also discusses the emergence of two new challenges for human rights theory; to promote the collective rights of individual countries in the 'new regionalism', and the relationship with traditional knowledge.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Meads

<p>Restrictive provisions in international trade agreements, particularly trade related intellectual property rights (TRIPS), are impeding access to essential medicines in developing countries, making medicines unaffordable to poor people. The extent to which trade restrictions have adverse effects on health and economic development in Fiji and the Pacific region may depend critically on how Pacific Island Countries cope with the forces of regionalism and the realities of joining the global trading system, where there are pressures to make concessions in TRIPS. Yet awareness is relatively low. A central question to be asked here is what underlying factors shape how Pacific islanders view trade and access to medicines, notably in the area of trade, health, local culture, and human rights and what are the regional and national responses to mitigate potential trade impediments. By combining a public health lens with a multi-sector review of population health trends, intellectual property rights law, trade policymaking, and human rights, this research elaborates multidisciplinary findings that are usually less evident because they are conventionally researched and managed on a sector-by-sector basis. The findings suggest human rights are less significant in this debate, with challenges associated with small island developing states, local cultural preferences and pressures from regionalism, having more of a direct influence. The combined effect of these factors may be creating a unique context that is leading the Pacific region not to deal with these issues as well as some other developing countries might. This paper also discusses the emergence of two new challenges for human rights theory; to promote the collective rights of individual countries in the 'new regionalism', and the relationship with traditional knowledge.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-127
Author(s):  
John Harrington

By foregrounding a widened view of the rule of law in transnational legal processes, the works under discussion in this symposium can support innovative critical perspectives on global health law –a field that has gained wide attention due to the spread of COVID-19 around the world (Lander, 2020; Bhatt, 2020). Legal and socio-legal scholars in the decade and a half before the pandemic worked on locating global health law and articulating its underlying principles. Lawrence Gostin's 2014 monograph offers a synoptic view centred on international institutions (e.g. the World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, UN Human Rights Council) and problems (e.g. infectious-disease response, tobacco control), along with an elaboration of its normative basis in universal moral principle and international human rights law (Gostin, 2014). Struggles over access to essential medicines and intellectual property in the early 2000s are, for example, represented in terms of the right to health constraining international trade law. Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Guenther Teubner's 2004 reading is oriented more by social theory than by doctrinal or ethical frames (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1006, 1008). A functional health regime has ‘differentiated out’, they observe, and operates as a discrete communication system across borders, albeit one that is threatened by the preponderant economic system. On this model, the battle for access to medicines amounts to ensuring, via human rights guarantees, that the rationality of the health system is not replaced by that of its economic rival in legal and policy communications (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner, 2004, pp. 1030, 1046).


2006 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Warsono Warsono

Human Rights are a fundamental problem in every country. especially in the developing countries such as Indonesia. Even though, the state had given protection of human right for everybody, but in Indonesia there are many breakdowns of it. As a democratic state, Indonesia has to regard human right. It is because the human rights were the core of democratic principle. So, the human rights must be trained in the school for every student. By using this way, everybody can know what their rights and obligations very well Civics education can be a vehicle for this goal, because it's one of lessons that talk about human rights and be learned in all school.


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