Pharmaceutical Access and the Human Right to Science

Access to medicines is a pertinent human rights issue: inadequate access to necessary medications poses severe consequences, including preventable deaths. The right of access to medicines is recognised as a fundamental aspect of the right to health, which is widely integrated into international and domestic legal systems. A right that has received less attention, however, is the right to benefit from scientific progress and its applications (hereinafter referred to as ‘the right to science’). This is a long-standing right, but has only recently begun to draw attention in the discourse on human rights. There is an interdependence between the two aforementioned rights, primarily in that science is required for the research and development of medicines. Thus it can be argued that, without the right to science, the right to medicines cannot be fully realised. This inquiry lays the foundation for further exploration of the utility of the right to science in alleviating prominent global issues such as inadequate access to medicines.