Source: G2O-THE ROME DECLARATION ON HEALTH – Other News
By Riccardo Petrella, Roberto Morea and Roberto Musacchio(*)
A mixture of hypocrisy, cynicism and indecency
We did not expect innovative proposals, but we did expect a little more breath of change. Well…. there was no breath. Worse still, in its place there were strong ugly winds.
1.First, the Declaration never, not even once, refers to the ‘universal right to health’. It does not mention it, confirming what the dominant groups have been doing for years: erasing it from the world political agenda and with it the principle that guaranteeing health universally, i.e. for all, is an institutional obligation for the public authorities, the states, and not a political option of magnanimity or compassion towards ‘the poor’ on the part of world leaders. Conversely, the Declaration speaks several times of “equitable and affordable access” to the tools for combating Covid-19 pandemic (vaccines, medical treatments, diagnostics and individual protection tools). In other words, a typically mercantile principle and objective, of monetised exchange (sale and purchase) according to market rules that have nothing to do with the right to health in equality and justice. In the market there are no rights, except for private property, no social justice. Forgetting the universal right to health is an act of political indecency.
2. Not surprisingly – another key aspect – the Declaration insists that the necessary steps that will be taken in the coming months to promote access to vaccines for all, must be defined and taken in the framework of the WTO Treaties (World Trade Organization, an independent body from the UN) and, in particular, of the WTO-TRIPs (Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights) treaties. And not within the general framework of the UN and specifically the World Health Organisation (WHO, a UN agency). The Declaration of Rome remains entrenched in the primacy given, also in the field of health, to the “world” regulation fixed in the logic of inter-national trade (dominated by the merchants and financiers of the most powerful countries in the world). The Rome Declaration remains on the position of refusing to attribute this primacy to the UN in general, and to the WHO in particular, as requested, especially in recent years, by 100 or more states, hundreds of Nobel Prize winners, scientists, personalities from the world of culture and thousands of associations and organisations, including trade unions. The acceptance of the primacy of the UN and the WHO implies that the rules on this matter will be established in compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the international treaties on civil, social and political rights of the 1970s. The signatories of the Rome Declaration are well aware that since 1994, the year of its creation, the WTO has been the scene of continuous hard struggles by the vast majority of member states against the most powerful states to defend their rights to life and their economic and social sovereignty, which have been systematically dismissed in the WTO treaties.
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