Health Groups Urge EU Commission To Safeguard Access To Medicines In Developing Countries

Health Action International (HAI) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF – Doctors without Borders) today issued a joint report on European Union commitments to safeguard access to medicines.

Their report [pdf] comes in the context of the revision of the European Union’s trade and investment policy, released today.

According to the report, the revision “should ensure that future trade and investment agreements reinforce public health in developing countries.”

“The European Commission’s current access to medicines commitments have proven to be empty words and gestures… and undermined by a long history of including substantive damaging TRIPS-plus [provisions going beyond the requirements of the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights] in EU free trade agreements, and other damaging EU trade policies.”

The report provides a set of recommendations, in particular that the EU not use free trade agreements with low and middle-income countries to introduce TRIPS-plus rules that extend monopoly protection, “nor introduce new IP enforcement rules or investment protection to the detriment of access to medicines.”

They also call the commission to “engage in meaningful technology transfer,” ensure transparency of the content of its IP-related assistance programmes for low and middle-income countries, and ensure that “parallel IP assistance efforts do not undermine health-related development projects.”

The commission, they said, should also refrain from using the term “counterfeit” when discussing concerns about the quality, safety and efficacy of medicines. Instead, the EU should “focus upon the categories of substandard and falsified medicines. The commission should “acknowledge that IP enforcement does not address concerns with substandard and falsified medicines, whether branded or generic.”