A Trade Environment and the Rights of Patients Dissertation

A Trade Environment and the Rights of Patients - Dissertation Example Recent free trade agreements have extended extremely generous patent rights to multinational pharmaceutical companies, and have limited access to generic equivalent drugs. In the â€Å"DOHA declaration on TRIPS and Public Health† of 2001, states that were members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) guaranteed that when a country is undergoing a public health crisis, it is not bound by its patents commitments. A consensus was reached that the provisions in the WTO having to with patents should be interpreted liberally in favour of the patient, and in favour of granting access to essential medicines. In order to circumvent these commitments, bilateral agreements are being forged by developed countries with lesser developed countries where the requirements for intellectual property law surpass those found in TRIPS. The TRIPS agreement does contain various safeguard mechanisms to protect public health. The two distinct safeguards are (1) parallel importation, and (2) compulsory licensing. By, its silence, the TRIPS allows countries to import drugs from another country that is selling it at a lower price. Countries must make domestic legislation in this regard. The US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement, however, is an example of how the US has engaged in scare tactics to pressure developing countries not to pass a parallel important law. Compulsory licensing, on the other hand, permits the government to grant compulsory licenses to particular companies to create generic versions of the drug and arrest a public health crisis.