Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health: Options for TRIPS Council

WORKING DRAFT – not for attribution, citation or quotation without author’s permission. 1 Comments welcome Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health: Options for TRIPS Council Dr. Amir Attaran, LL.B. Harvard University Center for International Development amir_attaran@harvard.edu For the first time in its history, international health and development are being discussed with interest at the World Trade Organization. The November 2001 declaration of the Fourth Ministerial Conference in Doha, Qatar, and its cousin, the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health (the “Doha Declaration”), 1 address trade topics of economic importance to developing countries, and in particular, the controversial issue of how the WTO’s rules on patents may harm public health in poor countries. The Doha Declaration is a success for the highly visible, international activist movement that over the last three years has illuminated the problem of pharmaceutical access in poor countries. International NGOs such as Action Aid, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontierès) and Oxfam have campaigned strongly in support of the thesis that the TRIPS agreement of the WTO, which binds developing countries to offer patent protection for pharmaceuticals, has had and will have a chilling effect on access to live- saving pharmaceuticals in poor countries. The activists conclude, inter alia , that to improve pharmaceutical access, TRIPS needs to be re-interpreted, or possibly amended, to permit more liberal exceptions to patent rights. Such exceptions could include “compulsory licensing”, which is the government-ordered divestment of a patentee’s exclusive rights in a pharmaceutical patent, in favor of a third party who obtains a license to manufacture, import, or sell the patented pharmaceutical. 2 This, combined with more generous transition periods for the least developed countries (and possibly other developing countries), is among the strategies activists favor to end what some call a “one-size-fits-all TRIPS”, in which rich and poor countries are treated similarly