A/HRC/36/19 report, the Panel recommended that the Secretary-General initiate a process to negotiate global agreements on coordinating, financing and developing health technologies, including a convention on research and development that delinked the costs associated with such activities from end prices to promote access to good health for all. It also recommended that the Secretary-General establish an inter-agency task force on health technology innovation and access in order to help increase coherence among United Nations entities and relevant multilateral organizations, such as WTO. III. Summary of the discussion A. Opening statement 6. In her opening remarks, the Deputy United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights emphasized that the right to health requires States to ensure universal access to good quality health care, including essential medicines, on the basis of equality and non-discrimination. While that meant that innovations essential for a life with dignity should be accessible to everyone without discrimination, currently, millions were living without access to essential medicines. That was not due to an inherent lack of commodities, but entirely to policy deficits and entrenched practices. The Deputy High Commissioner drew particular attention to the situation of women and girls who, despite being old enough to acquire a sexually transmitted infection or become pregnant, were denied the autonomy to access the necessary services and medicines for treatment and to control their own fertility. 7. States needed to shift from a dominant market-oriented perspective on access to medicines towards one in which there was a focus on ensuring the right to health. Powerful commercial and other interests should not be allowed to dictate public health policy to the detriment of human rights. That meant recognizing, and responding to, a number of challenges, including a disproportionate protection of intellectual property rights, which limited the policy space available necessary to Governments to take the measures to protect the right to health and which restricted access to medicines by expanding monopolies, maintaining high prices for longer periods of time and delaying the availability of generic medicines. Trade and investment agreements should be negotiated with human rights in mind and the availability, accessibility and acceptability of good quality medicines for all without discrimination should be integrated into all public policy frameworks. She highlighted the importance of empowering rights-holders to be partners in health, to claim their health and health-related rights and to enable policymakers on health to make people-centred decisions and hold them accountable for delivering on those. 8. In conclusion, ensuring access to health care was more than a matter of States’ political will, it was also a question of health economics, a matter of the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry, and a responsibility of health-care providers and health professionals. She called on all those authorities and actors to stand up for the right to health. Powerful interests should not dictate health policy to the detriment of human rights and protection of intellectual property rights could not trump the right to health. B. Overview of presentations by the panellists 9. Ms. Dreifuss introduced the work and report of the Panel, emphasizing that it addressed just one part of the problem of accessing medicines, and that there were many other obstacles, such as a shortage of health and transport infrastructure, a lack of financing for public health care, expensive health insurance systems and bureaucracy. She also highlighted that the Panel’s mandate concerned access to health technologies, which included not only medicines, but also vaccines, diagnostic tools and various types of medical equipment. 10. She underscored the shortcomings of biomedical research and the development of medicines based on the incentives provided by the present intellectual property regimes, which were founded on the existence of viable markets rather than an assessment of needs. 3