Globalization, Justice, & Health
Washington, November 3-4, 2003

Background of the meeting

The conference Globalization, Justice and Health will address two issues that are relevant for the BIG project: TRIPS and health and GATS and health. It is expected that the speakers in the two sessions will disagree over some of the expected consequences of these two treaties, such as for example over the relative importance of patent protection for treatment access, or the consequences of increased liberalization of services for health care provision. The first part of the meeting will briefly review areas of agreement and disagreement that will assist the project to identify issues that need to be explored further.

One of the main challenges is how one should balance legitimate concerns about removing trade restrictions that would impede economic growth, and thereby health status, and legitimate concerns about how liberalization of trade will affect health status adversely, in particular among disadvantaged groups. WTO does accept in principle that trade-offs can be made, and there are mechanisms for solving disputes. There is, however, concern that WTO is not the right body to handle these types of possible conflicts, and that it does not have the necessary expertise. It might therefore be important to explore alternatives, and this meeting will do that by looking at the relevance of the work that has been done to try to operationalize a right to health within the UN system. The discussion at the BIG meeting will take as a point of departure the points raised by Audrey Chapman the previous day.

There will only be very brief presentations, since many of the issues have been covered already during the previous two days.

The meeting will take place at the Department of Clinical Bioethics, Clinical Center, NIH in Bethesda.

The objectives of this meeting are therefore:

1) To assess the previous two days of discussions in terms of the relationship between TRIPS and health and GATS and health, and identify areas of agreement and disagreement.

2) To assess the relevance of human rights instruments for solving potential disputes between trade concerns and health concerns

3) To examine briefly the international agreement of tobacco control as a possible model