Environment

Relevant WTO treaties state that trade liberalisation and environmental protection are ‘mutually supportive’. Yet negotiations reveal more contentious discourses: that environmental regulation comprises ‘green protectionism’, or that environmental protection is a ‘non-trade’ issue. Mutual supportiveness does not contradict, but rather encompasses, these divisions. It maintains positive ambiguity: an assertion that there is no conflict between economic development and environmental protection, and also an aspiration yet to be achieved. While it implies a duty to seek good faith solutions in event of conflicts of laws or norms, it does not prescribe any precise obligation. Thus, it circumscribes the WTO’s environmental ambitions

Developing countries and the struggle on the access to medicines front: victories won and lost

This paper seeks to put the spotlight on the ongoing contestations in the area of trade negotiations, global intellectual property rights and access to medicines. It aims to shows that these contests are real and have important consequences on how global public health needs are met and on the form and shape of the emerging global IPRs regime. More specifically, it shows how the coalition of some developing countries and international health NGOs has scored some victories and lost ground elsewhere on the IPRs- access to medicines battle which is taking place both at the multilateral and bilateral level. It concludes that developing countries’ coalition needs to be both on the offensive and on the defensive, so as to defend past victories, cut losses and win new victories simultaneousl

The politics of intellectual property rights and access to medicines

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are about wealth and about who owns and controls knowledge. IPRs ultimately delineate the way in which knowledge – 'the new capital' – is created, owned, controlled and diffused both domestically and globally. But knowledge is also a public good in its own right, and impinges on the provision of other public goods such as health and education. It is precisely this dual nature of knowledge both as capital and as a public good that lies at the heart of any IP regime and contests over it. This book focuses primarily on the contests over intellectual property rights and access to affordable medicines that emerged in the 1990s and are still unfolding presently. It explores their origins, the actors involved in them and their outcome at the World Trade Organisation and in other fora of global governance. By doing so, it sheds light not only on the complex developments that have so far produced an arrangement that ensures wealth for some rather than health for all, but also to broader concerns that stem from a global governance system that operates without a shared social purpose