Patent rights on pharmaceutical products are one of the factors responsible for the lack of access to affordable medicines in developing countries. In this work, Emmanuel Kolawole Oke provides a systematic analysis of the tension between patent rights and human rights law, contending that, in order to preserve their patent policy space and secure access to affordable medicines for their citizens, developing countries should incorporate a model of human rights into the design, implementation, interpretation, and enforcement of their national patent laws. Through a comprehensive analysis of court decisions from three key developing countries (India, Kenya, and South Africa), Oke assesses the effectiveness of national courts in resolving conflicts between patent rights and the right to health, and demonstrates how a model of human rights can be incorporated into the adjudication of patent rights.

Transnational Legal Orders offers an empirically grounded approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states that reframes the study of law and society.

This book examines one of the most controversial aspects of the world trading system: patents and access to medication, and offers approaches to tackle the issue of how to better accommodate human rights in the trading system.

Millions of people around the world do not have access to the medicines they need to treat disease or alleviate suffering. Strict patent regimes introduced following the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 interfere with widespread access to medicines by creating monopolies that keep medicines prices well out of reach for many. 0The AIDS crisis in the late nineties brought access to medicines challenges to the public?s attention, when millions of people in developing countries died from an illness for which medicines existed, but were not available or affordable. Faced with an unprecedented health crisis ? 8,000 people dying daily ? the public health community launched an unprecedented global effort that eventually resulted in the large-scale availability of low-priced generic HIV medicines. 0But now, high prices of new medicines - for example, for cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis C - are limiting access to treatment in low-, middle and high-income countries alike. Patent-based monopolies affect almost all medicines developed since 1995 in most countries, and global health policy is now at a critical juncture if the world is to avoid new access to medicines crises. 0This book discusses lessons learned from the HIV/AIDS crisis, and asks whether actions taken to extend access and save lives are exclusive to HIV or can be applied more broadly to new global access challenges.

The issue of how patents impact medicine has increased in significance within the last decade. The book provides an explanation of the current international infrastructure and explains how competing patent perspectives play a thus far unacknowledged role in promoting distortion and confusion.

This collection of essays examines central issues of property theory from a variety of perspectives.

In The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power, researcher and global advocate Ellen 't Hoen explains how new global rules for pharmaceutical patenting impact access to medicines in the developing world. The book gives an account of the current debates on intellectual property, access to medicines, and medical innovation, and provides historical context that explains how the current system emerged. This book supports major policy changes in the management of pharmaceutical patents and the way medical innovation is financed in order to protect public health and, in particular, promote access to essential medicines for all. The Open Society Institute provided support to translate this report into Russian.