Vaccine access and Covid waiver in light of overlapping commitments outside TRIPS

UNCLC guest speakers

On 23 March, UNCLC welcomed Prof Henning Grosse Ruse-Kahn and Dr Federica Paddeu, both from the University of Cambridge, who presented their joint paper “Vaccine access and Covid waiver in light of overlapping commitments outside TRIPS”, based on a report for the South Centre.

The talk looked at the TRIPs Covid waiver, so-called TRIPs+ provisions, intellectual property provisions of free trade agreements and international investment agreements and general international law defences to see if intellectual property rights can easily be suspended to allow the production of Covid vaccines and treatments by others than the intellectual property rights owners. The talk was very insightful and well attended and it generated a lot of interesting questions.

Speaker biographies:

Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan is a Professor of International and European Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of King’s College (Cambridge) and an external researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich (Germany). Henning’s research and teaching focuses on international intellectual property protection and development issues, world trade and investment law, as well as on interfaces amongst legal orders in international law, including transnational law set by private actors.

Federica Baddeu is the Derek Bowett Fellow in Law, Queens’ College; Fellow, Lauterpacht Centre for International Law

Abogado (cum laude), Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, Caracas - Venezuela; LLM in international law and PhD (Yorke Prize), University of Cambridge.

Federica is a general international lawyer, and her main research interests are the law of State responsibility, the law on the use of force, and international investment law. She is also interested in the legal theory and practice of exceptions. Her work has been published in leading international law journals, including the British Yearbook of International Law, the European Journal of International Law and the American Journal of International Law. A monograph based on her PhD dissertation, Justification and Excuse in International Law: Concept and Theory of General Defences, was published by CUP in 2018.

Before arriving at Cambridge, she worked for Baker&McKenzie (Caracas office).