Human Rights and the WTO: The Case of Patents and Access to Medicines

ISBN-13: 9780199215201 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 300 str.

Holger Hestermeyer

Opis

The international trading system has come under increasing attack by activists as being in conflict with human rights law, yet some have defended the system as contributing more to the fulfillment of human rights than many other areas of international law. This study examines the alleged conflict of WTO law with international human rights law, using one of the most prominent examples of such a conflict: the one that exists between international patent law, and access to medication as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This highly controversial political issue of the appropriate use of international patent law on life saving medicines gained the world's attention during the discussion about the price of AIDS medication, but recent instances also include the availability of the patented medication for bird flu and for anthrax.
The book discusses both the patent law and the international human rights law involved in great depth, distinguishing between obligations under different human rights instruments and including a highly readable introduction into both areas of law. It then explains the concept of conflict between legal regimes and why patent law and human rights law are in conflict. The current state of international law on the conflict between legal regimes and the origin of such conflicts is analyzed, covering such issues as hierarchy in international law and introducing the concept of 'factual hierarchy'. The book then turns to the role of human rights law in the WTO system, concluding that such law currently is limited to aiding the interpreting of the WTO agreements. It shows how a further integration of human rights law could be achieved and describes the progress made towards accommodating human rights concerns within the TRIPS Agreement, culminating in the first ever decision to amend a core WTO Agreement in December 2005.

Recenzje

Human rights and patent rights have become increasingly intertwined in discussions surrounding access to pharmaceutical drugs by citizens of developing countries...in his excellent book....Hestermeyer has tackled this complex and contentious conflict, disentangled it into its essential constituent parts, including patent law, human rights, and international trade under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime and its side-agreeemnt on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Proeprty (TRIPS), and then artfully reconstructed a clear, cogent, and hopeful model of how to approach a resolution. His research is meticulous, his prose spare yet fluent, and his arguments persuasive and well-supported

O autorze

Dr. Hestermeyer graduated from Münster University Law School (Germany), received an LL.M. from the University of California at Berkeley (USA) and a doctorate from Hamburg University's School of Law (Germany). He worked as a junior researcher at Heidelberg's Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and Public International Law, clerked in Hamburg and worked as a trainee solicitor for the German Foreign Office as well as law firms in Hamburg, Madrid and Alicante. He returned to Heidelberg's Max Planck Institute as a research fellow in 2006. Dr. Hestermeyer is admitted to the New York State Bar, he is a former Fulbright Fellow, German National Merit Foundation Fellow and German National Merit Foundation Doctoral Fellow.