The COVID-19 pandemic has caused Governments to contemplate measures to override patents and other intellectual property rights (IPRs) in order to facilitate production and distribution of vaccines, treatments, diagnostics and medical devices. This paper discusses whether the COVID-19 pandemic...

The WTO has just finished two and one half years of negotiations on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, with an additional tranche of negotiations scheduled to commence soon. These negotiations have been extraordinarily instructive on the subject of trade diplomacy and the means by which ends...

In August 2001 the first public meeting of the American Society of International Law Project on Human Rights and International Trade (‘Project’) was held at the World Trade Institute in Berne, Switzerland. One session of that meeting was devoted to the relationship between human rights and...

We are considering the relationship between human rights and trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS). Intellectual property rights (IPRs) have always reflected a balancing of general public interests and private stakeholder interests, and in this sense IPRs take into...

China's transition from a statist to market economy over the past 15 years and its successful establishment of globally competitive industry are unprecedented historical events. Although China's entry into the WTO is not responsible for that transformation, it has played an important role....