Human Rights, Global Responsibility and Access to Treatments in the Developing World: Presentations Made on the Occasion of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network Annual General Meet and Skills Building Workshops, Montreal, 21-23 September 2001

This document contains the texts of presentations made at the panel discussion on Access to Treatments in Developing Countries, and at the closing plenary of the 2001 Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network Annual General Meeting. Mark Heywood of the AIDS Law Project provided a South African perspective on why the issue of access to medicines is critical to the response to the epidemic in that country; Marie Helene Bonin of Doctors without Borders Canada discussed reasons why medicines are not available for diseases affecting the third world; Richard Elliot of the HIV/AIDS Legal Network discussed the implications of TRIPS on equitable access to health care in Canada; and David Roy of the Montreal Centre for Bioethics presented on moral and ethical imperatives for providing affordable medicine to people in the Third World. For the closing plenary, Mark Heywood explored the links between access to treatment and the broader issues of globalization, development and human rights. Richard Elliot spoke about what Canada needs to do to live up to its obligations on the UN Declaration Commitment on HIV/AIDS.