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The ability of governments to protect and promote health-related human rights can be constrained by international trade rules, including those of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO rules can increase medicine prices, challenge tobacco control measures, restrict national food safety policies, and facilitate brain drain from public health services. This chapter offers a brief history of the WTO’s origins, a high-level overview of the health implications of various WTO agreements, and a closer look at how two key issues—access to medicines and tobacco control—have created greater policy space for health within the WTO. It then identifies the institutional factors that promote or hinder human rights protection and offers conclusions on the prospects for institutionalization of health-related human rights. This chapter concludes that protecting health within the WTO and broader global trade regime is possible, but remains a significant challenge due to major power asymmetries.

The modern access-to-medicines movement grew largely out of the civil-society reaction to the HIV/AIDS pandemic three decades ago. While the movement was successful with regard to HIV/AIDS medications, the increasingly urgent challenge to address access to medicines for noncommunicable diseases has lagged behind—and, in some cases, has been forgotten. In this article we first ask what causes the access gap with respect to lifesaving essential noncommunicable disease medicines and then what can be done to close the gap. Using the example of the push for access to antiretrovirals for HIV/AIDS patients for comparison, we highlight the problems of inadequate global financing and procurement for noncommunicable disease medications, intellectual property barriers and concerns raised by the pharmaceutical industry, and challenges to building stronger civil-society organizations and a patient and humanitarian response from the bottom up to demand treatment. We provide targeted policy recommendations, specific to ...