Verdens fattigste lande kan få billig medicin otte år endnu

The TRIPS Agreement contains minimum standards of protection for pharmaceutical intellectual property, but also accommodates developing countries’ needs.

For example, it gives countries the right, under specific situations such as public health emergencies, to issue compulsory (tvungne /obligatoriske) licences – an authorization given by a government to a third party to produce a patented invention without the permission of the patent-holder.

The consensus decision allows for negotiation for a further extension once the eight-year period is up; the current extension was due to expire on 1 July 2013.

LDCs initially sought an extension at least until each individual country was no longer considered an LDC, a move resisted by developed countries, who own most intellectual property rights.

“This is important and positive, though it is regrettable that the exemption will expire in 2021, instead of being indefinite, that is, until a county no longer is `least-developed’,” said Catherina Timmermans, an intellectual property expert for international health financing mechanism UNITAID.

“The benefit of this is that LDCs are not under an obligation to comply with the TRIPs standards – whether it is patents, trademarks, copyright or design – and therefore have the flexibility to adjust their domestic laws, many of which were inherited from the colonial period, in appropriate ways to allow for the manufacture of cheap drugs for their populations,” Aziz ur Rehman stated.

He is intellectual property adviser for Médecins Sans Frontières’s (MSF) Access Campaign.

“LDCs should take advantage of this flexibility to learn from countries like India and other developing countries that have used it to developed manufacturing capacities, especially in the field of pharmaceuticals,” he added.

More than 80 percent of all donor-funded antiretroviral (livsforlængende) drugs (ARVs) used in developing countries are Indian generics (kopimedicin); the availability of cheap ARVs has enabled more than eight million people globally to access essential HIV treatment.

More work ahead