Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-03-Speech-2-225"
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"en.20010403.10.2-225"2
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".
Over recent weeks, there has indeed been a great deal of public attention surrounding a trial taking place in South Africa against the pharmaceutical industry and the South African Government and also a complaint lodged against Brazil by the United States.
I shall not comment on these cases which are
but I believe that it is worthwhile to explain the Commission’s policy on this issue which includes the problem of action to take against communicable diseases affecting developing countries.
The issue was referred to us last summer and we have worked on this, whilst trying to be both ambitious and fair. In September, we organised an international round table in Brussels, out of which came a number of recommendations, ranging from a diagnosis according to which the issue of access to key drugs involves both local systems for care provision, policies for prevention and, of course, questions of the pricing and thus the funding of medicines.
We came up with a global approach based on three pillars. The first is to step up our measures in this area, on the basis of development policy; the second is to lower the price of key drugs and the final pillar is to continue with high level research so that public research can be carried out alongside private research in this area. We very recently began a specific action programme based on this approach which forms part of a whole raft of actions adopted by the WHO, the UN and UNICEF, the ONPI and the WTO. I believe that we are now already seeing some of the first real effects with a number of pharmaceutical companies announcing that they are committed to lowering prices.
What part does intellectual property play in this matter? In our view, it has a major part to play, as intellectual property is required in order to stimulate both innovation and research. This is the role of TRIPS, which is the WTO agreement on intellectual property and today we clearly stated that we are defending this concept. However, we also stated and we are stating this just as clearly, that there are cases where exemptions from patent law – which is called compulsory licensing – are permitted for public health or urgent health reasons. We would like to reiterate that the WTO agreement on intellectual property stipulates this flexibility. The same, of course, applies to parallel imports, since the agreement leaves this open to WTO members to decide what can or cannot be done. As far as we are concerned, we are also willing, at European Union level, to move ahead with this issue if it allows us to make progress on the issue of tiered pricing.
The legal provisions, which Mrs Carlotti mentioned, do not therefore present an obstacle. It is the ways in which they may be interpreted that could pose a problem. We have clearly stated our own interpretation. This, perhaps, goes further than some other WTO members would wish, but that is the situation, and we committed ourselves during the preparatory phase for the Doha meeting and in the ONPI and the WTO to push the consensus towards our own flexible interpretation of the WTO provisions."@en1
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