The Ethical Implications of the TRIPS Agreement

Sammanfattning: The current TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement established by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is a major determinant of accessibility to drugs. In International Relations (IR), the discourse surrounds the role of these intellectual property rights on the global economic order. Pogge argues that the TRIPS agreement is immoral since it creates a global economic order that harms the poor mostly concentrated in the global south, whereas defenders of TRIPS argue that it is the only way to efficiently incentivise innovators whilst maintaining an open market. This thesis has fulfilled two purposes; firstly, to investigate the causal relationship between the TRIPS agreement and access to covid-19 vaccines in India and secondly, to analyse the ethical implications of the TRIPS agreement using International Political Theory (IPT). This thesis couples Pogge’s global justice theory with postcolonial theory and argues that it serves as a good framework to critique the TRIPS agreement. The methodological framework used to address the causal relationship between TRIPS and access to drugs is one of Bayesian process tracing. It was found that factors such as regulatory sabotage, production deficits and American trade law could be larger issues than TRIPS when it came to vaccine accessibility in India.