CII213 | International Trade, Intellectual Property and Public Health

This would be a stand-alone course with no prerequisites, but students with prior knowledge of international trade law, intellectual property law, human rights law or public international law, would be at an advantage.

This course is an expanded version of the intensive elective 2-credit 24-hour course I teach at Georgetown University Law Center. I have excluded the area of traditional medicinal knowledge and its link with the Convention on Biological Diversity as I consider this to be less important for this course. I have chosen materials that I consider to be basic reading, assuming no prior knowledge of Iinternational trade or intellectual property law. Students will also be given selected primary materials depending on their research topic of interest for the term paper. I reserve the right to add to the prescribed readings, including printed or audio visual materials.

My pedagogical method would be lectures, with Socratic discussion, based on prescribed reading. I believe in learning by doing and so there would also be group discussion/role play based on selected topics (see lesson plan) as well as compulsory student research presentations.

This course will cover all the WTO agreements relevant to public health but will focus in more detail on the TRIPS Agreement. I will begin the course with an introduction to the WTO and to the relevant WTO agreements (GATT, TBT, SPS, GATS). I will then move on to the relevant sections of the TRIPS Agreement, together with the WTO jurisprudence and comparisons with IP chapters in select free trade agreements (FTAs). I will then explain the relevant post-1995 WTO declarations and decisions, including the waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and current negotiations to extend this. This course briefly covers the relevant work in the World Health Organization (WHO) post-1995, including the current negotiations on the Pandemic Agreement. Please also see session-wise lesson plan below.