It is already clear that Switzerland’s foreign health policy is marked by almost unresolvable tensions between varied, occasionally even contradictory interests. For example, the humanitarian goal of enabling the largest possible number of people in developing countries to access lifesaving medication is hard to combine with the current form – demanded by the pharmaceutical industry – of patent protection for drugs.
We also need to scrutinise to what extent the explicit commitment to a liberal global economic system and to free trade can be reconciled with the humanitarian vision of the human right to health. For example, various authors have argued that it is unregulated free trade and the privatisation and marketisation of healthcare in a global economic system dominated by industrialised countries that cements structures of inequality and jeopardises the health of large population groups. Accordingly, it would be better if Switzerland advocated for questions of health protection and access to medicines to be given greater weight in trade and investment agreements in future.
Switzerland shows its international political will
The fact that Switzerland established an interdepartmental foreign health policy strategy in recent years was an important step from both a national and a global perspective. This is not only because Switzerland has thereby committed itself to humanitarian principles, such as making access to medication easier or developing local healthcare systems; it also demonstrates the international political will to establish the country in the changing global healthcare architecture, which today consists of a large number of state and non-state actors and initiatives in addition to WHO. This kind of position offers the opportunity to play a key role in reforming and reshaping the international health system and strengthening WHO, which would also benefit Geneva as a centre for international health diplomacy.
