Could international compulsory licensing reconcile tiered pricing of pharmaceuticals with the right to health?

BMC International Health and Human Rights

Peter S Hill³  Owain D Williams³  Lisa Forman¹  Gorik Ooms² 

[1]Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, 155 College Street, Toronto M5T 3M7, Ontario, Canada

[2]Law and Development Research Group, Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

[3]School of Population Health, The University of Queensland, Herston Road, Brisbane 4006, Australia

关键词: Compulsory licensing;    Patent;    Medicines;    TRIPS;    Tiered pricing;    Right to health;   

Others  :  1113300
DOI  :  10.1186/s12914-014-0037-4

 received in 2014-09-08, accepted in 2014-12-08,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Background

The heads of the Global Fund and the GAVI Alliance have recently promoted the idea of an international tiered pricing framework for medicines, despite objections from civil society groups who fear that this would reduce the leeway for compulsory licenses and generic competition. This paper explores the extent to which an international tiered pricing framework and the present leeway for compulsory licensing can be reconciled, using the perspective of the right to health as defined in international human rights law.

Discussion

We explore the practical feasibility of an international tiered pricing and compulsory licensing framework governed by the World Health Organization. We use two simple benchmarks to compare the relative affordability of medicines for governments – average income and burden of disease – to illustrate how voluntary tiered pricing practice fails to make medicines affordable enough for low and middle income countries (if compared with the financial burden of the same medicines for high income countries), and when and where international compulsory licenses should be issued in order to allow governments to comply with their obligations to realize the right to health.

Summary

An international tiered pricing and compulsory licensing framework based on average income and burden of disease could ease the tension between governments’ human rights obligation to provide medicines and governments’ trade obligation to comply with the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights.

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Ooms et al.; licensee BioMed Central.

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