As we talked today in class, President Obama announced the last 23rd of April, at the heels of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the creation of the U.S. Atrocities Prevention Board. This institution is aimed toward forming an early-warning system of potential genocide and other politically driven humanitarian catastrophes.
You can find more information in the next link:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/04/23/469559/obama-atrocitiies-prevention-board/?mobile=nc
On March 28th 2012, the trial in which the Swiss multinational Novartis faced the Indian government for its Patent Act began. It is the last phase of more than six years of legal battle and the access to quality generic drugs for millions of patients around the world is at stake.
The rules of the WTO allow pharmaceutical companies to patent their new drugs to compensate for the costs of research, allowing the selling of drugs for the price that the companies choose for the next 20 years. This means that the drugs have to be purchased at very high prices during this period of time, out of the reach of people with fewer resources.
In 2004, India approved a patent law in accordance with WTO guidelines but with a fundamental change: the prohibition of the continuation of patents. He did it by appealing to the Doha Declaration signed by the WTO in 2001, which states that the Treaty on Intellectual Property can be interpreted and implemented taking into account the right of countries to protect public health and ensure access to medicines.
From this statement, the Indian government introduced a clause in its patent law which states that only it will be recognized for “truly new” drug patents, which are the result of innovative research.
In this legal context, the legal battle between Novartis and the Indian government began in January 2006, when India refused to grant a patent for ”Gleevec”, a Novartis drug that treats leukemia because, as it claims, the compounds of medicine are not new, but simply new forms of known substances, for which Novartis had not, under Indian law, right to have a new patent.
If Novartis wins, the case could set a precedent and lead to a fundamental change in Indian patent law, which would have serious consequences in terms of access to essential medicines for millions of people that need them for surviving.
In this sense, I agree with Mr. Basheer, a professor at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata, who said that “it is important that the court take on the matter and interpret the law in a way that balances the need for innovation against public health concerns” because we should not forget that we are talking about human beings.
In this respect, we accept the idea of the ownership of ideas. However, we do not notice how monstrous it is to deny ideas to people who are dying without them.
Last week, we were talking about the different water conflicts in the world. One of these conflicts takes place in the Nile basin. Trying to know more about this topic, I found an interesting article by Lester R.Brown, the president of the Earth Policy Institute and the author of “World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse”.
In this author´s opinion, there is the possibility of a new conflict in Africa because countries such as Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, and India are acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice, and corn for consumption back home. These takings of land reduce the food supply in the African countries, which are prone to famine; this also threatens the newest democracy in Africa: Egypt.
Egypt is one of the leading wheat importers in the world and, while it is trying to function as a democracy after President Mubarak departure, these leases of land are threatening their ability to feed their population because all the grain in Egypt is imported or produced with Nile water.
For these reasons, the conditions established in the Nile Waters Agreement of 1959 are changing, as the rich foreign governments and international firms have come into play.
The Nile´s natural limits are being broken because of the increase of the water demand owing to the demographic growth and the foreign acquisitions of land. In this sense, it is necessary to try to avoid international conflicts over water. This author suggests three different initiatives:
First, governments must address the population threat head-on by ensuring that all women have access to family planning services and by providing education for girls in the region. Second, countries must adopt more water-efficient irrigation technologies and plant less water-intensive crops.
Finally, for the sake of peace and future development cooperation, the nations of the Nile River Basin should come together to ban land grabbed by foreign governments and agribusiness firms. Since there is no precedent for this, international help in negotiating such a ban, similar to the World Bank’s role in facilitating the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan, would likely be necessary to make it a reality.
I agree with this author because I think it is necessary to control the increasing trend towards the liberalization of the purchase of African lands, including its diversity and water resources by the other countries. This is because these takings are accompanied by the expulsion of peasant and indigenous people who inhabit these lands and may even increase the problem of famine, which is a reality in Africa nowadays that the international community should face.
For many people in this area, the water is the big difference between a farm or just a desert. The Nobel Prize Winner Anwar El Sadat stated that water is the only reason that Egypt would go to war. However, will this problem be the reason for a war or a violent conflict in the future? I hope that the increasing scarcity of water leads all these nations to the understanding that the cooperation path is a better way to reach their national interests and build a Nile community.
The more and more I read about the flaws that lie within the international system, I can’t help but to think that the Democratic Peace Theory may be the answer. Democratic countries tend to agree with one another because they have the same ideas and aspirations, for the most part. The countries that give organizations the most problems (African countries with the WTO, Iran and North Korea with the NPT and IAEA for example) have different aspirations because of their cultures. Democratic states, although not exactly the same, have some similarity in cultural mind-sets toward such issues. Weiss’ article on global governance isn’t really there, its just made up of a bunch of organizations trying to control the important facets of international law. Until we have one autonomous ruling body over all countries, the problems of the international legal system will remain fragile and flawed. I don’t see this autonomous organization, country, or whatever it may be in the near future, nor could I ever see this body without causing an international hysteria.
With her essay, VanDeveer emphasizes the implications of the fact that in international law, there can be no true central international authority – only international cooperation between states. Due to the lack of a global government (arguably, because such a body would ultimately be in serious conflict with the ideals of democracy, at least according to Rubenfeld), states must themselves become individual leaders in dealing with the environmental crisis. Of course, powerful and developed states are much more clearly in a position to take the lead on this issue, which in terms of international cooperation entails that these states “have a disproportionately large opportunity to improve its environment by enacting strong and sensible policy at home and supporting – rather than undermining – international environmental laws and organizations” (59).
Of course, this means that the U.S. would need to take on environmental regulation first and foremost as an important domestic concern (and not only relative to past domestic efforts or popular opinion, but in the context of setting a progressive example relative to the rest of the world). I was then wondering: although environmental summits and conventions admittedly have had little direct effect on U.S. actions (and thus, perhaps we should focus on putting pressure on the U.S. government internally), haven’t environmental organizations and activist groups already been making domestic efforts alongside the international summits, etc, and attained similarly disappointing results so far? What makes us think domestic efforts will work better in the acknowledgement of international law’s limitations? However, perhaps pressure would substantially increase internally in the event of a truly widespread, global awareness of the need for individual state leadership.
At the beginning of this course, I would likely have been strongly opposed to the concept of a world government. I believe that diversity between peoples and nations is one of the most important assets of humanity, and I thought that a World Government would have the potential to threaten that heterogeneity. However, after the exposure of our course, I have felt like our current system might be more conducive to dominant nations setting the tone of international relations than a world government might. We have discussed how our current system allows powerful states to subtly dominate the rule-making of the international system. I think it’s possible that a World Government if organized properly could allow for more transparency and commitment to the process of international disputes. Ideally such a system would have checks to restrain any one state or one group of states to exercise an inequitable amount of power.
I understand Weiss’ discontent with the current international law system and its decentralized structure. However, he seems to dismiss the realist perspective too easily, not fully addressing the lack of desire, on the parts of states, to give up such a substantial amount of autonomy. He seems to suggest (in the middle of page 260) that one manifestation of a world government would be a security council that could make decisions independently from its member states. While it is true that we see some states resort to tribunals and hand over authority to rule on certain issues on occasion, it does not seem reasonable to expect states to sign on to a new structure of global government, in which the surrendering of such authority is always fundamental obligation.
The current decentralized system is not necessarily inherently flawed. Although the power balance may not always be fair, the system allows for actors to address issues relevant to their interests, allowing for flexible, innovative resolutions to issues that the member states can agree with. There’s also the fact that some components of international law are intenetionally ambiguos to allow for individual states to negotiate and come to diplomatic resolutions. The notion of a global government does not seem compatible with such characteristics of current international law. Unless the specifics of what a global government would look like are elaborated further, it is difficult to see how it would be feasible in the present, as well as why efforts for progress cannot be made within the current framework.
While reading about both the European and American approaches to international law, I was brought back to the predicament of African states in their lack of participation in international economic bodies such as GATT or the WTO. This perpetual cycle of an inability of African states to self-advocate or wield any economic power within the international community brings to mind a book I read over the summer. It is called Dead Aid, and it is about why international humanitarian aid in African nations has yet to have made any significant progressions in the empowerment of African states relative to other states around the world. The author, who is from Namibia herself, supports the idea of African nations following, not their current path of economic development (which is modeled more after Western ideologies and capitalism), but after that of the Asian tigers. Which is incredibly interesting when considering that other developing countries are not having the same predicament and weaknesses of African states. Therefore, I believe that arguments such as these truly do support a different pathway for development. This does, unfortunately, promote a perspective that overlooks much corruption for the sake of economic development. However, this is unfortunately already a reality within many African states, without the benefit of economic development.
In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s analysis, “Leading Through Law”, she emphasizes that the creation of international law is not just a form of abstract development in itself. Instead, international law is mobilized and sustained through a series of complex treaties and customary practices that act as its governing framework. It is through this framework that oversee the legalities on an individual state’s use of force, protection on human rights, global public health participation, and division on global commons (i.e. oceans and space). For Slaughter, the development of international law since the Cold War era has greatly favored American interests and the core values of the international law exemplify the heart of fundamental American values. I agree with Slaughter when she ties the growing strength of international treaty regimes to the level of active participation the United States has in their creation and development. Although the United States does continue to hold a strong seat of power in the international arena and continues to be the pacemaker for upholding the sanctions made by international regimes, I also believe that there will be an increasing shift away from centralizing predominantly on American values as the power dynamics of rising nations such as those of BRIC begin to carve out greater spheres of influence in international law.
I thought that the Rubenfeld article does a good job of tracing the origins of international law and, by extension, explaining why the international legal system works the way it does today. International law is limited most severely by the international community’s acceptance that, above all things, national sovereignty. From the United States’ perspective, the American victory in WWII was a victory for democracy and popular nationalism- sovereignty would go on to dictate the way international law is applied and enforced. Today, however, the same pride of sovereignty and nationalism sometimes does more to hurt the international legal system and weaken multilateral, international cooperation. This not only often prevents formal international law from adjudicating when it is appropriate, it also adds to the burden of the world-policeman US. Suddenly, military intervention missions more frequently become an issue that is singularly handled by American forces; a situation like Libya, for example, is only handled by the United States. This will not only pose a problem for the American military- an exhaustion of military supplies and weapons but also of our troops- but it is also dangerous for US foreign policy and its political standing with the rest of the world. In order to prevent an American police regime from being forced on the international legal system, and on the US itself, it is up to international institutions to recognize the dangers of such a scenario and work to make international law more binding and enforceable.
