TRIPS and Public Health (Summary)-法搜-中国法律信息搜索网

　The amorphous nature of the right concerning health—its ambiguity, its elasticity, and the difficulty of translating it into enforceable legal standards—has frustrated efforts to give it meaning in the WTO legal regime. This article hopes for recognition of health as a value in international law, contending that the WTO law recognize a right to health, in essential, not only in the name as some western scholars arguing. It should be the duty of the WTO governance organs to apply this principle in making law, and the WTO governance organs should take further steps to make this recognition explicit.
　Protection of health as both an interpretive principle and the internationally justifiable right allows room for balancing it with other goals. This can ensure the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health when respecting national variations in resource availability. The appellate body and the Ministerial Conference should make this recognition explicit.
　
　Part 2: Intellectual Property Rights，Public Health and the Doha Declaration
　
　Nowhere has the perceptions of conflicts between the WTO system and the protection of health been as strong as in the area of trade in lifesaving medicines. The public health crisis especially the AIDS pandemic has pushed WTO’ treatment of drug companies’ intellectual property rights to be one of the most visible and poignant international issues of our time.
　It has been realized that the provisions of the TRIPS Agreement may affect the enjoyment of the right to health. As for the WTO’ chief response to this issue, its highest governing body, the ministerial conference, issued a pronouncement in November 2001, declaring that members have a “right to protect public health, to promote access to medicines for all”, and “ to use, to the full use, the provisions in the TRIPS Agreement, which provide flexibility for this purpose”. The TRIPS Agreement recognized competing tensions between exclusivity and access, and the Doha Declaration tries to clarify and resolve this problem.