EU Wants TRIPS Waiver Forever on Pharma Products for LDCs

Move Counters India’s Foray in Sector

The European Commission announced this week that it will support the least developed countries’ (LDCs) request for easier access to cheaper medicines through an indefinite exemption from WTO intellectual property rules for pharmaceuticals.

“Although patents stimulate innovation in developed and emerging economies, intellectual property rules should be a non-issue when the world’s poorest are in need of treatment,” declared EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström. 

The exemption “will give the least developed countries the necessary legal certainty to procure or to produce generic medicines,” she said.

It would simply be unacceptable for the US to oppose the duration requested by LDCs and to instead require LDCs to return repeatedly to the TRIPS Council every few years for successive short-term extensions, reads a letter from leading NGOs.

The TRIPS Council is the WTO body tasked with administering the organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

Access to cheaper medicines

Earlier this year, the WTO’s poorest members led by Bangladesh tabled a proposal for extending indefinitely their transitional period for enforcing global trade rules protecting pharmaceutical patents and clinical data, as well as a related waiver involving patent protection and exclusive marketing rights for pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical products.

Should this transitional period expire in January 2016, as it is currently set to do, some WTO members argue that requiring LDCs to enforce these rules could constrain their capacity to make or procure low-cost generic medicines.

The proposal tabled by Bangladesh on behalf of the LDC Group back in February requested that the transition period for LDCs remain in force for as long as those countries remain under that category, citing among other reasons the health burdens that result from high rates of HIV and other diseases in their countries.

In June 2013, WTO members agreed to extend the transition period for LDCs to implement the overall TRIPS agreement until July 2021. That extension, according to the same decision, noted that it occurred “without prejudice to another WTO Council Decision of 2002 on the extension of the LDC transition period for “certain obligations with respect to pharmaceutical products” that expires in 2016.

The next TRIPS Council is scheduled to take place from 15-16 October.