One Paragraph And Two Articles

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Law needs to be precise. Not ambiguous or vague. There is of course a difference between ambiguous and vague, although the two words are sometimes used synonymously. Vague means something that is not clearly stated. Ambiguous means something that is capable of more than one interpretation. Stated thus, ambiguity is a subset of vagueness, but not the other way round. Removal of ambiguity and vagueness reduces scope for subsequent disagreements and disputes.

Here is a statement that is ambiguous. “This chilling tale, told in a 13-page report released today by Edward F Stancik, the special commissioner of schools, raised serious questions about the detection and reporting of child abuse by school officials.” On the face of it, I don’t understand what this means and the sentence is ambiguous. Were school officials indulging in child abuse? Probably not. They were indulging in detection and reporting of child abuse. If this presumption is correct, the sentence should have been better drafted. Imagine what would have happened had a court case resulted. “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” is reasonably well-drafted law, although a reading of the Indian Penal Code will convince you that there can be subjectivity in interpreting the term adultery. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife,” is relatively worse, because coveting refers to a state of the mind. And this brings me to the ministerial declaration on the Trips agreement and public health, issued by the ministers in Doha on November 14 2001.

This is not quite law, but the issues are similar. Consider para 6, now widely debated in Geneva and elsewhere. “We recognise that WTO members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under the Trips agreement. We instruct the Council for Trips to find an expeditious solution to this problem and to report to the General Council before the end of 2002.” If, following the second sentence, the Trips Council has to find an expeditious solution by the end of 2002, the Trips Council (and everyone else) has to understand what the first sentence means. Compulsory licensing and WTO members are concepts that are easy to pin down. But which are the countries that have insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector?