For years, the pharmaceutical industry had been able to complicate the production of generic medicine massively. Thereby, people in third-world countries were hindered to access urgently needed medicine. The pharmaceutical industry recalled its right to intellectual property which was regulated in the TRIPS Agreement from 1994. But uprising nations were able to achieve a liberalization of the existing patent law, in favor of the right to health. This liberalization will lead to an inversion of the hierarchy of norms.
In HSFK-Report 5/2014 "Ordnungswandel durch Umkehrung einer Normenhierarchie. Der Schutz geistigen Eigentums und das Recht auf Gesundheit", Saskia Scholz and Klaus Dieter Wolf analyze these developments and provide suggestions how norm and order changes can be induced in the future.
Saskia Scholz studies Peace and Conflict Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Darmstadt and works as a student assistant at PRIF in Research Department "Private Actors in the Transnational Sphere".
This HSFK-Report is available at PRIF for 6 € or as free PDF download.