Abstract

This article examines recent controversies over the relationship between human rights and intellectual property rights (IPRs). Many activists have claimed that IPRs conflict with human rights. Others have argued that IPRs are themselves human rights. The article approaches the debate as an opportunity to clarify the nature of IPRs in relation to human rights, as well as the nature of contemporary struggles over these rights. After surveying the dual expansion of both human rights and IPRs and rejecting the view that IPRs are rooted in human rights, the author investigates the example of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the global Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines in order to illustrate attempts to represent IPRs as an outright threat to human rights. Highlighting the limitations of a human rights-based critique of IPRs, he concludes by proposing to study contemporary conflicts over IPRs and human rights as struggles for recognition and as struggles over the institutionalization of a transnational “recognition order.”