Of Medicines and Markets: Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era (Stanford Studies in Human Rights) - Hardcover

Godoy, Angelina Snodgrass

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804785600 ISBN 13: 9780804785600

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Central American countries have long defined health as a human right. But in recent years regional trade agreements have ushered in aggressive intellectual property reforms, undermining this conception. Questions of IP and health provisions are pivotal to both human rights advocacy and "free" trade policy, and as this book chronicles, complex political battles have developed across the region.

Looking at events in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Angelina Godoy argues that human rights advocates need to approach intellectual property law as more than simply a roster of regulations. IP represents the cutting edge of a global tendency to value all things in market terms: Life forms-from plants to human genetic sequences-are rendered commodities, and substances necessary to sustain life-medicines-are restricted to insure corporate profits. If we argue only over the terms of IP protection without confronting the underlying logic governing our trade agreements, then human rights advocates will lose even when they win.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is Helen H. Jackson Chair in Human Rights and founding director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Angelina Snodgrass Godoy is Helen H. Jackson Chair in Human Rights and founding director of the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Popular Injustice: Violence, Community, and Law in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2006).

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Of Medicines and Markets

Intellectual Property and Human Rights in the Free Trade Era

By Angelina Snodgrass Godoy

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8560-0

Contents

Foreword...................................................................
vii
Acronyms and Abbreviations.................................................
xi
Acknowledgments............................................................
xiii
1 Trading Health for Wealth................................................
1
2 A Primer on Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property.........................
21
3 Market Failures and Fallacies............................................
51
4 Local Politics, Strange Bedfellows, and the Challenges of Human Rights 
Mobilization...............................................................
79
5 Patient Advocacy and Access to Medicines Litigation......................
107
6 Writing Globalization's Rule Book........................................
129
Notes......................................................................
153
References.................................................................
159
Index......................................................................
173

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Trading Health for Wealth

Edgar's smile was not a polite nice-to-meet you smirk but one ofthose grins that first ignited in his coffee-colored eyes and then radiated,broad and beautiful, across his face. He settled into his plasticchair and leaned forward, friendly, engaged, eager to hear the questionswe'd come to ask him. Among an organization of strikingly optimisticpeople, Edgar seemed particularly so. Yet, cast against his unassailablygenerous spirit, the one question he asked us was devastating: "Why wouldyour Congress make it harder for me to get my medicine?"

My students and I met Edgar in the summer of 2004, in the officesof a Guatemalan HIV+ organization called Gente Positiva. At that time,CAFTA—the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement—was awaitingratification in all the member countries. The agreement was the first majorextension of the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) model,hailed as a stepping-stone to an eventual Free Trade Area of the Americas;its announcement had touched off battles around labor rights, environmentalprotection, and threats to peasant agriculture. In addition, criticshad begun to raise concerns about the agreement's chapter 15, whichgoverned intellectual property (IP) rights. In Guatemala in particular, acoalition of public health, human rights, and alter-globalization activistshad come together to advocate against the IP provisions in CAFTA, whichthey argued would curtail access to medicines by limiting the availabilityof low-cost generics. On the day the Guatemalan Congress ratified theagreement, some took to the streets wearing jerseys emblazoned with theslogan, "My life is not for sale."

This was a new issue for Central American human rights advocates.Indeed, CAFTA itself was something of a turning point for the movement,marking a new era of engagement with global economic structures.

Guatemala, like some other countries of the region, had only recentlyemerged from a prolonged armed conflict that had inflicted deep and painfulwounds on the social fabric; a UN Truth Commission had declaredin 1999 that the atrocities committed in the context of the thirty-six-yearwar constituted a genocide against the indigenous Maya. When I beganresearch on human rights issues in Guatemala in the mid-1990s, the fieldwas dominated by discussions of postwar justice and reconciliation. Forensicanthropologists spearheaded the scientific exhumations of massgraves littered across the countryside; lawyers undertook the careful workof knitting together testimonies with legal tools, seeking accountabilityfor wartime atrocities; the UN Mission in Guatemala, tasked with verifyingcompliance with the Peace Accords, issued periodic reports on thestatus of implementation efforts; human rights organizations documentedthreats against witnesses in court cases and called for truth telling aboutpast violence. Everywhere, the focus was on issues related to state violence.

But by 2004, when we met Edgar, things had shifted perceptibly. Donorsupport for the various legal accountability efforts had waned, perhaps inresponse to disheartening outcomes—even today, the military leaders responsiblefor crimes against humanity have largely eluded justice—or perhapsin reflection of a broader reframing of global human rights concernsin the wake of 9/11. The UN Mission had left the country. Various forms ofinternational assistance were still present, but they tended increasingly toplace priority on alleviating the region's enduring poverty rather than promotingpostwar justice. The genocide had mostly slipped from the headlines.In this context, beginning in 2003, behind closed doors and withoutany involvement from civil society organizations, the governments of theUnited States and various Central American countries—Costa Rica, ElSalvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—had hammered out acomprehensive agreement that established new rules and procedures fortrade relations.

If some in the human rights community had until then consideredtrade law a technical province of administrative procedures largely unrelatedto its core concerns with justice and accountability, such assumptionsfaded fast when CAFTA's content was unveiled in 2004. Amid thelayers of legalese were new rules for doing business across borders; newlimits on what national laws could regulate, promote, or prohibit vis-à-visthe conduct of private industry; new institutions for adjudicating disputesbetween corporations and governments; and new ways of envisioning thesocial contract.

Given the history of Central America, it was not difficult to imaginethat these ways of reconfiguring corporate relationships with states in aninterdependent global arena could have human rights implications. Thiswas nowhere clearer than in Guatemala, once the proverbial "bananarepublic" where an attempt to nationalize lands held by a U.S. corporation—UnitedFruit, now known as Chiquita—had triggered the ouster ofdemocratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in a 1954 coup backed bythe CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The violence that followed the couprapidly devolved into civil war, as a series of U.S.-backed dictators tookturns battling Marxist guerrillas and eventually waging genocide againstthe country's indigenous majority. So, some seven years after the signingof the country's Peace Accords, when the text of CAFTA was made public,those paying attention immediately recognized what was at stake andscrambled to organize in response.

But it was an uphill battle: Prolonged civil wars had turned societiesinward, had polarized them along ideological lines, and had decimatedcivic engagement. The issues in the agreement were complex and cloakedin language that was difficult to understand. And poverty, the lack of education,and underemployment already had the majority of the region'spopulation locked in a daily struggle for subsistence, in which informingthemselves on the finer points of trade...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804785600
• ISBN 13: 9780804785600
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande