Right to Health and Pharmaceutical Patents

The extension of the term of validity of intellectual patent protection inserted in the Brazilian legal system is a "safeguard" against administrative inefficiency in the examination and processing of patents for reference medicines in the face of generic medicines. As well as strengthening the "judicialisation" of health by causing the inaccessibility of medicines - most of which are high-cost - that should already be in the public domain, it has caused a considerable financial impact on Brazil's public coffers and is incompatible with the Constitution and therefore: with the temporary privilege it contains, the social function of property, administrative efficiency, legal certainty, the country's technological and economic development and especially with the realisation of the right to health. Although progress on the issue in Brazil is still resilient, we have briefly highlighted in this work the added value of measures that are already being implemented at national level, as well as through international cooperation, and we have proposed other alternatives for mitigating the problem in question.