Human rights & intellectual property for universal access to new essential medicines

This chapter illustrates how human rights principles can help governments, even those with the most modest budgets, scale-up universal access to expensive essential medicines. The key message is that governments have legally binding human rights obligations to immediately take steps to provide essential medicines. These steps include making a maximum of public resources available to finance essential medicines, particularly for vulnerable and marginalized groups, and using those resources efficiently. Crucially, using mechanisms to control medicines prices and, in the case of high priced patented medicines, the use of TRIPS flexibilities, is aligned with governments’ duties under human rights law to ensure access to essential medicines. Moreover, the right to health imposes duties on the international community of States and the pharmaceutical industry to respect and protect access to essential medicines