Domestic litigation has become a principal strategy for realizing international treaty obligations for the human right to health, providing causes of action for the public’s health and empowering individuals to raise human rights claims for HIV prevention, treatment, and care. In the past 15 years, advocates have laid the groundwork on which a rapidly expanding enforcement paradigm has arisen at the intersection of human rights litigation and HIV/AIDS policy. As this enforcement develops across multiple countries, human rights are translated from (...) principle to practice in the global response to HIV/AIDS, transforming aspirational declarations into justiciable obligations and implementing human rights through national policies and programs. (shrink)

Given current constraints on universal treatment campaigns, recent advances in public health prevention initiatives have revitalized efforts to stem the tide of HIV transmission. Yet, despite a growing imperative for prevention—supported by the promise of behavioral, structural and biomedical approaches to lower the incidence of HIV—human rights frameworks remain limited in addressing collective prevention policy through global health governance. Assessing the evolution of rights-based approaches to global HIV/AIDS policy, this review finds that human rights have shifted from collective public health (...) to individual treatment access. While the advent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic gave meaning to rights in framing global health policy, the application of rights in treatment access litigation came at the expense of public health prevention efforts. Where the human rights framework remains limited to individual rights enforced against a state duty bearer, such rights have faced constrained application in framing population-level policy to realize the public good of HIV prevention. Concluding that human rights frameworks must be developed to reflect the complementarity of individual treatment and collective prevention, this article conceptualizes collective rights to public health, structuring collective combination prevention to alleviate limitations on individual rights frameworks and frame rights-based global HIV/AIDS policy to assure research expansion, prevention access and health system integration. (shrink)

The TRIPS agreement has been widely discussed. Critics have accused it to favour property rights at the cost of public health in AIDS-stricken development countries. In this article, the conflict between on the one hand Intellectual Property Rights and on the other a right to subsistence is analysed with the help of a method for specification. The rationalization of TRIPS and its amendments raises two questions for ethics, one normative and one meta-ethical. First, which right has priority: the right to (...) property or the right to subsistence? Second, how can conflicting rights be reconciled in a coherent ethical system. The aim of the article is to answer these two questions and in order to do that the method of specification developed by the philosopher Henry Richardson is applied. The result is a specified norm applicable for this kind of rights conflicts. (shrink)

The legal and moral issues that synthetic biology and its medical applications are likely to raise with regard to intellectual property and patenting are best approached through the lens of a theoretical framework highlighting the ‘‘co-construction’’ or ‘‘co-evolution’’ of patent law and technology. The current situation is characterized by a major contest between the so-called IP frame and the access-to-knowledge frame. In SB this contest is found in the contrasting approaches of Craig Venter’s chassis school and the BioBricks school. The (...) stakes in this contest are high as issues of global health and global justice are implied. Patents are not simply to be seen as neutral incentives, but must also be judged on their effects for access to essential medicines, a more balanced pattern of innovation and the widest possible social participation in innovative activity. We need moral imagination to design new institutional systems and new ways of practising SB that meet the new demands of global justice. (shrink)