Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of measures such as compulsory licensing as a 'right' of governments in protecting
public health and promoting access to medicines.
these rhetorical commitments were matched by considerable policy and price
shifts. as a combination of pressure, concessions, and generic alternatives from India,
which was not yet bound by the trIPS agreement, drug prices in many low income
countries dropped from US$15 000 to as low as US$148 per annum per person
(wHo and UnaIDS 2006, 20). Global funding mechanisms were created, such
as the Global Fund to Fight aIDS, tuberculosis, and Malaria, the U.S. President's
emergency Plan for aIDS relief (PePFar), and the world bank's Multi-country
HIv/aIDS Program for africa. these have become primary sources of financial
assistance for treatment programmes in developing countries, especially in sub-
Saharan africa.
after doing very little about access to art in the developing world, in July 2002
the wHo (2004a) announced the adoption of the '3 by 5' initiative, an ambitious
and essentially advocacy-oriented programme designed to place 3 million people
in developing countries on art by 2005 through providing extensive technical
assistance and guidelines to countries. the wHo explicitly intended the adoption
of this programme to be the realisation of human rights. while this goal of bringing
art to 3 million people was not achieved, by 2005 more than 1 million people in
developing countries were receiving treatment. the wHo thereafter shifted upward
to the goal of achieving universal access to art by 2010 for all those who need it.
this commitment was similarly made by governments participating at the 2005 Un
World Summit (UN General Assembly 2005, para. 57[d]) and adopted that same
month by the G8 (2005, para. 18[d]) at the Gleneagles G8 Summit as a programmatic
aspiration for assistance to africa. access to art in sub-Saharan africa rose from
less than 1 percent in 2000 to 28 percent in 2007 (wHo, UnaIDS, and UnIceF
2007).
Human Rights as a Framework for Global Governance
the aIDS medicines experience holds a number of implications for global health
governance. Its outcomes indicate that rights-based discourse, litigation, and action
played significant roles in shifting policy, prices, and perception regarding aIDS
medicines. In the PMa case, activists were able to use rights-based arguments in
concert with mass action and media attention to ensure a growing reputational
damage for the industry, which ultimately assured their withdrawal of the litigation.
However, the PMa case also illustrates how social action and rights discourse
persuaded a global collective of the legitimacy of the rights claim for medicines,
and of the immorality of the corporate positions. this not only assured the collective
disapproval that became so important to ensuring the corporate withdrawal of its
litigation, but also ensured a far broader global acceptance of the rights claim and
a shift in perspectives on the moral necessity of aIDS medicines in africa. the
impact of rights-based social action therefore appears to have shifted the global
