This is a past event
The requirement of providing patent protection to pharmaceutical products as a result of the TRIPS agreement has been debated since the agreement entered into force. After HIV/AIDS epidemic, Covid-19 has sparked controversy between access to medicine and property rights one more time. India and South Africa proposed a temporal waiver of several parts of the TRIPS agreement for the Covid-19 related technologies in October 2020 to provide equal distribution of the patented products without relying on pharmaceutical companies’ voluntary arrangements. More than 100 countries supported the waiver. However, almost two years after the proposal, 1,5 years after the first vaccine was administrated, a decision was given on 17 June 2022 by the WTO, which was far from what was needed. The presentation aims to show why relaxation of international patent protection was needed for Global South countries through some current example issues in relation to Covid-19 voluntary arrangements. From those examples, it would be apparent one more time that strong patent protection jeopardises access to health technologies equally and raises significant distributive justice problems. Here, the unfair distribution of patented technologies is considered a problem of global justice, and the issue is considered with a cosmopolitan point of view, which requires removing state borders and considering every individual as an agent, regardless of nationality, religion, race, ethnicity, etc.
Dilara Aydin is a visiting Ph.D. student at the University of Aberdeen and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Waikato. She holds a University of Waikato Doctoral Scholarship. She graduated from Istanbul University Law Faculty in 2015 and completed her LLM degree in International Commercial Law at the University of Aberdeen in 2018. She was admitted to Istanbul Bar Association in January 2017. She practiced in Turkey in different areas of law, mainly employment law, company, and contract law. Her PhD thesis focuses on investment protection of intellectual property rights, with an emphasis on the pharmaceutical sector.
- Speaker
- Dilara Aydin
- Hosted by
- Centre for Commercial Law
