What is Oxfam's position on TRIPS?
Oxfam is advocating for fair patent rules which ensure that poor countries are able to afford basic medicines. To do this, there should be a comprehensive review of the TRIPS Agreement to assess its impact on poor people and revise it as necessary to ensure that its provisions are not undermining development.
Oxfam America is working with a broad coalition of NGOs in the US and abroad to call on World Trade Organization members to uphold the promises made at Doha. WTO members must agree on a meaningful solution to the paragraph 6 problem that grants developing countries the same rights to affordable medicines as those enjoyed by rich countries. Any agreed solution should be:
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fair, permanent, and permit economically viable production of medicines;
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beneficial to all developing countries and covers all diseases;
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quick, simple and easy to operate; and
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free from extra WTO obligations on developing countries.
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By: Catalina Aneca |
The US Trade Representative (USTR) should participate in the multilateral TRIPS Council negotiations on this issue, and it should back an effective, workable solution to the dilemma of poor countries which lack manufacturing capacity in obtaining life-saving medicines. It should abandon its restrictive, unilateral policy on access to medicines, which does not provide countries with legal security in terms of issuing compulsory licenses and producing/exporting needed drugs. The policy's application is unfairly and arbitrarily limited to certain diseases and certain countries only. The USTR must favor patients' rights and the lives of millions of sick people over the interests of its domestic pharmaceutical lobby.
Countries at different levels of development require differing intellectual property (IP) provisions, and this flexibility should be available to countries when drafting their national laws. A one-size-fits-all approach to intellectual property protection, reflective of extremely high levels of IP protection such as those under US law and imposed on all countries, rich and poor, may do more harm than good in developing countries. A 2002 report by the UK government's Commission on Intellectual Property Rights examined the impact of global intellectual property rules on developing countries, finding that the current system hampers their interests in a number of areas, including public health. The report sets forth suggestions as to how rules such as TRIPS can and should be revised so that the international IP system can promote rather than hinder the advancement of poor countries. The report can be found at http://www.iprcommission.org.
Oxfam supports revision of the TRIPS Agreement so that its provisions foster development and enable governments the flexibility to pursue national public policy objectives, in addition to rewarding innovation.