Much international debate over access to medicines focuses on whether patent law accords with international human rights law. This article argues that this is the wrong question to ask. Following an analysis of both patent and human rights law, this article suggests that the better approach is to focus on national debates over the best calibration of patent law to achieve national objectives.

Patents and free trade make strange bedfellows. For most of their history, patents have been instruments deployed to resist trade with other countries, not to enhance it. Whether one looks at Venetian laws that punished citizens who practiced local crafts outside the city, the Mercantilist uses to which patents were put in Elizabethan England, or the cartels of the 19th and 20th centuries created on a foundation of interlocking patent rights, patents have had a distinctly protectionist function. It is thus (...) ironic that it is intellectual property rights in general, and patents in particular, that have been held up in recent years as the poster child of much that is wrong with globalization and free trade. Nowhere is this more so than in debates concerning international human rights law and patents, in particular the position that patents violate an international right to health. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the international implications of liberal theories which extend justice to sentient animals. In particular, it asks whether they imply that coercive military intervention in a state by external agents to prevent, halt or minimise violations of basic animal rights can be justified. In so doing, it employs Simon Caney's theory of humanitarian intervention and applies it to non-human animals. It argues that while humane intervention can be justified in principle using Caney's assumptions, justifying any particular intervention on (...) behalf of animals is much more difficult – and in present circumstances impossible. If these claims are correct, a number of important conclusions follow. First, all states lack legitimacy because of the horrors that they inflict upon animals. As a result of this, all states are prima facie liable to intervention by external agents. To remedy this situation, all states have the responsibility to massively transform their relationsh... (shrink)