Patents for pharmaceuticals and access to affordable medicines: towards an all-encompassing access paradigm for Africa
The connection between patents for pharmaceuticals and access to affordable medicines has elicited considerable attention and highly stimulating debates since the emergence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement) as part of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing WTO in 1994. The TRIPS Agreement is the first international convention to make it mandatory for all countries to make patents available in all fields of technology provided the invention to be patented meets the criteria for patentability. Consequently, countries like India, Brazil, China and Thailand that used to refuse to grant patents for pharmaceuticals were constrained to amend their patents laws to bring them in line with the WTO standard. Many developing countries did not even have legislation for a number of the intellectual property rights areas covered by the agreement at the time it was adopted. The TRIPS Agreement has been criticised as being a significant part of the global access to medicines problem and strong arguments have been raised for having more flexible standards for the protection of patents particularly in relation to pharmaceuticals. 
This thesis examines the WTO regime for patent protection in the context of pharmaceuticals and the existing flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement that countries seeking access to affordable patented pharmaceutical products might adopt. The effectiveness of the TRIPS compulsory licensing regime is examined, with particular focus on the limitations resulting from the TRIPS requirements for test data protection. The concepts of parallel importation and exhaustion of intellectual property (IP) rights are also examined with aview to ascertaining the extent to which they may serve as legal stratagems for developing countries seeking access to affordable medicines. The thesis argues that the existing frameworks for the right to health and the right to development in international law may provide a strong justification for the broad interpretation of the existing flexibilities in the TRIPS Agreement without the need for going through the very rigorous process of amending it. The thesis considers the patents and access to medicines problem in the context of the special and highly complex challenges people in Sub-Sahara Africa are currently encountering. It recommends the establishment of an African Free Trade Area to make it easier for Africa as a continent to make better use of the TRIPS flexibilities. The thesis argues that more than ever before, the time has come for Africa to harness her resources to address her access to medicines problem through the use of all the available options in international economic law and international human rights law.
Patent Law Harmonization in the Age of Globalization: The Necessity and Strategy for a Pragmatic Outcome
While international patent law harmonization has been an issue in progress since the conclusion of the Paris Convention in 1883, it is facing new challenges due to its rising prominence in a knowledge-based economy and the world's growing sensitivity to the patent system's social and economic role in society. Since their beginning, patent laws have been inherently diverse for several reasons: territoriality, and distinct policy goals and cultural backgrounds of each nation. However, as globalization intensified the problem of fragmented patent laws, arguments for harmonizing patents laws obtained dominant support in international communities. This paper addresses the need to harmonize patent laws among countries within the growing trend of globalization. The paper further examines implementing measures that realize the harmonization of patent laws. To answer questions regarding the level and order at which harmonization should take place, it is necessary to divide harmonization into four categories according to the procedural-substantive and legislative-administrative standpoint. Even though substantive and legal harmonization might be the final goal of harmonization, it costs too much and takes too long. Rather, as a practically plausible alternative based on cost-benefit analysis, it is worth focusing on a modest harmonization-administrative and substantive harmonization for "Work-sharing." To implement work-sharing with minimum costs and delay, it is necessary to scrutinize several strategies that promote language based cooperation, offshore outsourcing, regional patent system, and combination with PCT. Within the undeniable trend of globalization, it is essential to find broad and innovative international cooperation that can benefit all participating countries.
Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor During the ‘Invention of Tribalism’ in Zimbabwe
There is evidence from across the disciplines that at least some of the contemporary regional names of African tribes, dialects and languages are fairly recent inventions in historical terms. This article offers some evidence from Zimbabwe to show that missionary linguistic politics were an important factor in this process. The South African linguist Clement Doke was brought in to resolve conflicts about the orthography of Shona. His Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects (1931) shows how the language politics of the Christian denominations, which were also the factions within the umbrella organization the Southern Rhodesia Missionary Conference, contributed quite significantly to the creation and promotion of Zezuru, Karanga and Manyika as the main groupings of dialects in the central area which Doke later accommodated in a unified orthography of a unified language that was given the name Shona. While vocabulary from Ndau was to be incorporated, words from the Korekore group in the north were to be discouraged, and Kalanga in the West was allowed to be subsumed under Ndebele. Writing about sixty years later, Ranger focusses more closely on the Manyika and takes his discussion to the 1940s, but he also mentions that the Rhodesian Front government of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately incited tribalism between the Shona and the Ndebele, while at the same time magnifying the differences between the regional divisions of the Shona, which were, in turn, played against one another as constituent clans. It would appear then that, for the indigenous Africans, the price of Christianity, Western education and a new perception of language unity was the creation of regional ethnic identities that were at least potentially antagonistic and open to political manipulation. Through many decades of rather unnecessary intellectual justification, and as a result of the collective colonial experience through the churches, the schools and the workplaces, these imposed identities, and the myths and sentiments that are associated with them, have become fixed in the collective mind of Africa, and the modern nation states of the continent now seem to be stuck with them. Missionaries played a very significant role in creating this scenario because they were mainly responsible for fixing the ethnolinguistic maps of the African colonies during the early phase of European occupation. To a significant degree, these maps have remained intact and have continued to influence African research scholarship.