This paper aims to analyze the links between access to justice and the effectiveness of one aspect of the right to health: access to medicines. It initially presents the challenges and difficulties in the conceptualization of health and right to health, and then analyzes individual lawsuits demanding medicines against public services, from June 2007 to July 2008, entered at Rio de Janeiro State Court of Appeals. It appears that the medical drug prescription, the economic conditions of the applicants and the urgency of access to medicines are the main factual basis of judicial sentences examined, which determine the supply of medicines as required by the authors. Finally, it concludes that the effectiveness of the right to health requires a set of policy and broader government actions, and not merely formal and restrictive court orders. The individual's claims cannot be considered as the main deliberative instrument in the management of pharmaceutical care in the Brazilian Health System, but accepted as an important element in the decision making of managers and, often, in the improvement of the access to medicines under National Health System. In the Brazilian democratic context, the judicialization can express demands and modes of action of citizens and legitimate institutions. Thus, the main challenge is to make policy and social strategies orchestrated with other mechanisms and instruments of democratic security, to improve health and justice systems in order to give effectiveness to the right to health.
right to health; pharmaceutical services; justice administration system; bioethics
