Justice Prabha Sridevan
SouthViews No. 207
28 September 2020
Today the judicial authority may be faced with balancing patent rights and patients’ rights or right to life. It shall use all the tools at its command and innovate if necessary, but shall rule in favour of life.
There cannot be a better moment than now, the year of COVID-19, to place my argument, that the right to health and ergo the right to a life with dignity is way ahead of the right that the patented invention obtains to the owner. An open letter has been addressed by heads of States and others to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Our world will only be safer once everyone can benefit from the science and access a vaccine – and that is a political challenge… Now is not the time to allow the interests of the wealthiest corporations and governments to be placed before the universal need to save lives, or to leave this massive and moral task to market forces.” It is equally a judicial challenge. I argue that the right to life which logically means the right of access to medicine and the right to health, inheres in every human being and is not bestowed under any grant, and is unlimited by time. But the patent right is one granted by the State to the inventor as a quid pro quo allowing the owner to enforce and protect his right for a period at the end of which the owner shall transfer the technology and the invention comes to the public space.
