Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
UnaIDS 1998, 13). as a result, there was no international funding for developing
countries to purchase drugs, and companies gave extremely limited price concessions.
access to art in developing countries generally was around 5 percent, and in sub-
Saharan africa—the epicentre of the global pandemic—access was considerably
under 1 percent.
Yet access to aIDS treatment in sub-Saharan africa was seen not simply
as financially unwise but as naive, unrealistic, and even unlawful. International
organisations, pharmaceutical companies, and governments argued that the trIPS
agreement did not permit limitations of patents; that patents could not be limited
in any way without destroying the medical innovation system; that poverty, not
patents and prices, determined access to medicines (International Federation of
Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations 2000, 10; Rozek and Berkowitz
1998); that access to medicines in poor countries was in any event irremediable; that
african healthcare systems were inadequate for the complex and expensive task of
monitoring the efficacy of complicated art; and that africans were in any event too
ignorant to adhere to complicated art routines (Donnelly 2001).
A Shifting Approach to AIDS Treatment: Human Rights and the Pharmaceutical
Manufacturers' Association of South Africa
civil society actors and people with HIv/aIDS around the world were not, however,
content to accept the
status quo
, and global treatment advocacy focussed on aIDS
medicines emerged (Highleyman 2001; t'Hoen 2002). In the face of the almost
unchecked growth of HIv/aIDS in sub-Saharan africa and its corresponding mass
scale of deaths, activists were able to force the question of affordable aIDS medicines
into the global spotlight as a grave human rights concern, rather than simply a
question of intellectual property protections under the trIPS agreement. while the
human rights dimensions of the problem were to some extent evident in the scale of
HIv/aIDS-related deaths in sub-Saharan africa, activists were also able to point to
the legal protection that international human rights law gives to the right to health
and its implied right to access essential medicines (see, for example, Un committee
on economic and Social council committee on economic, Social and cultural
Rights [CESCR] 2000, art. 12.1; UN Office of the High Commission for Human Rights
[UNHCHR] 1966, paras. 12 and 43).
However, international human rights law offered only vague normative support
for the proposition that access to medicines should supersede intellectual property
protections. ensuring that governments lowered art prices as a human rights duty
required a different consensus in global policy circles. the impetus for this shift
came in the infamous case of the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers' association of
the U.S. and 40 pharmaceutical companies used trade pressures and litigation to
prevent the South african government from passing legislation to access affordable
medicines. South africa, then as now, had one of the world's largest HIv epidemics.
the industry claimed that the legislation (and the parallel importing it authorised)
