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The Long-Term International Law Implications of Targeted Killing Practices

“Targeted killings are not a new practice – governments have long sought to prevail over their enemies by engaging in premeditated killings of individual suspects. What is new now is the rapid development and proliferation, and increasing deployment, of technologies which permit such killings to be carried out with greater ease and with little immediate risk to one side’s citizens, together with concerted efforts by some to offer general legal justifications for current targeted killings practices, and, in some cases, to attempt to redefine existing legal frameworks to expand the circumstances in which such killings may be carried out ‘lawfully.’

“Current targeted killings practices and the attempts to legally justify those strikes present a challenge to the systematic protection of the right to life under international law. We are now witnessing a significant effort by some states to insulate their “targeted” uses of deadly force from international scrutiny and to redefine international law in order to serve narrow and short-term interests. This presents a serious risk of leaving everyone less secure, particularly if other states around the world, as they acquire the new technology, claim for themselves the same expanded rights to target their enemies without meaningful transparency or accountability.

“The challenge is to ensure that strong protections of the right to life under international law survive the practices of a few states, technological developments, and outlier attempts to redefine core legal standards.”

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Offensive Economic Espionage?

Concluding that the law enforcement model for preventing cyberespionage is ineffective, this article proposes a modified strategy that expands the process of responding to online economic espionage by allowing retaliation by a victim after it had analyzed the attack and determined with the necessary level of confidence that it came from a particular nation-state and, if possible, that it originated from a particular source. If the victim could, at a minimum, determine the location from which the attack originated, offensive economic espionage would allow it to launch a responsive act of economic espionage against an appropriate entity in the host state.

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Targeted Killing, Human Rights and Ungoverned Spaces

This brief commentary considers the potential effect of a territorial state’s international human rights obligations on the law governing targeted killings. It posits that these obligations should limit permissible attacks by an attacking state when the territorial state is not party to an armed conflict with the relevant non-state actor, particularly when a territorial state consents to the attacking state’s actions. It also argues that a territorial state’s extraterritorial human rights obligations provides support for an attacking state’s right to resort to force in the territorial state when it fails to suppress a resident threat. It concludes by briefly suggesting that recognizing the necessity of effective governance to the preservation of human rights could prompt the development of an international law of ungoverned spaces, perhaps best thought of as “international martial law.”

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Making Intellectual Property Work for Global Health

Intellectual property rights (IPRs) are often conceived narrowly from the vantage point of offering incentives for private sector investment in research and development (R&D), but the legal regime of IPRs can also work to improve access to public goods for global health, particularly for those disadvantaged by destitution and disease. The WHO Global Strategy and Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property (GSPOA), adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2008, calls for an “enhanced and sustainable basis for needs-driven, essential health research and development relevant to diseases that disproportionately affect developing countries.”1 How knowledge is generated, owned, and harnessed to support pro-poor development is at the heart of this effort. New approaches to tiering, pooling, and open-source collaboration have resulted from the struggle to deliver affordable treatments for AIDS and neglected diseases. In examining how intellectual property rights can most effectively and strategically support developing countries in implementing this ambitious and potentially catalytic agenda in enabling innovation for global health, this paper seeks to outline a coherent and strategic approach to address human development needs and to facilitate the harnessing of innovation and the sharing of knowledge for global health.

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Three Ways of Thought About Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights

For more than two decades, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has been using the tools of trade policy to encourage U.S. trading partners to provide adequate and effective protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR). That effort has both involved and inspired considerable discussion by governments and private actors on the meaning, determinants, and importance of adequate and effective IPR protection.
This essay explores one aspect of that discussion—the determinants of effective protection—by considering three commonly held beliefs about the path to overcoming the failure of a country’s intellectual property laws to provide adequate and effective protection. Each of these ideas posits a determinant of effective IPR enforcement: The first is domestic economic interest, the second is the rule of law, and the third is political will. I aim to briefly critique each of these ideas, propose a way of fitting them together, and extrapolate a general prescription.

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The Economics of Access to Medicines

Each year more than eighteen million human lives end in death from poverty-related causes, fully one-third of all human deaths globally. This amounts to fifty thousand deaths per day from causes such as respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, and tropical diseases. Many of these are treatable, if not curable, conditions. The numbers are overwhelming and mandate an examination of the barriers to accessing medicines in developing countries, where the majority of these deaths occur. Admittedly this is an immense and complicated issue, and the economics behind pharmaceutical innovation and access is but one facet of a complete understanding of the problem. This paper describes the context of the problems surrounding access to medicines, highlighting the tremendously complicated web of issues that prevent medicines from reaching the world’s poorest. The following sections provide a bit of background on pharmaceutical patents, international intellectual property law, the pharmaceutical industry perspective, and the complicated elements that come together to create the most significant barriers to pharmaceutical access. While the international patent system is obviously flawed and in need of improvement, it is overly simplistic to blame drug patents and the global pharmaceutical industry for the access problem. The reality surrounding the challenges of access to medicines is more nuanced. In the debate over barriers to access, the culprits include corruption, poverty, taxes and tariffs, and pharmaceutical counterfeiting. Section two presents the fundamentals of the global pharmaceutical market. Section three introduces the challenges surrounding access to medicines. Section four provides analysis, and section five concludes.

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