Brussels, 09/01/2003 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday, Pascal Lamy announced that he had put a compromise paper on the World Trade Organisation's table in an effort to jumpstart the issue of developing countries' access to medicines. This initiative follows the failure of negotiations last December, due to the position of the USA (see EUROPE 30-31 December 2002 p 3). EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy believes that the most recent decision made by Washington with regard to access to medicines are not acceptable insofar as they are unilateral and consequently do not offer any legal guarantees. The compromise presented, aimed at a multilateral solution and was sought by the in the terms of the preliminary draft, which was agreed to by all WTO members, except for the US, in December. This would provide arbitration by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in cases of possible litigation resulting from the inclusion of a particular disease on the non-restrictive list of diseases covered by the agreement facilitating access to medicines.
In December, following the lack of support by the USA, WTO countries were not able to adopt a draft decision to allow developing countries that did not have industrial capacity to produce crucial medicines in the struggle against major epidemics hitting them, at affordable prices. The USA believed that the draft was too unclear on what diseases were covered by the proposed mechanism. Washington was in fact afraid of a possible extension of the mechanism to non-infectious diseases, such as diabetes and asthma, which would have resulted in weakening protection by patents and subsequently research and development in the pharmaceutical industry. The US therefore decided to adopt a unilateral solution that consisted in only granting derogations to multilateral provisions in the area of intellectual property when they were based on their own list of diseases.
Acknowledging that this list was long and contained "essential" diseases, Pascal Lamy stated to the press that the US solution was not acceptable for one main reason, the fact that it was unilateral and also because developing countries and the EU had not accepted it either. The Commissioner explained that they wanted a solution - a "multilateral contract" and that the US solution did not offer legal guarantees, as well as running the risk of being only temporary, due to its unilateral nature.
In an effort to break the deadlock at the next Executive Council of the WTO on 10-11 February, the European Commissioner has therefore decided to launch an initiative based on the draft compromise of last December. In a letter to WTO members dated 7 January, Pascal Lamy proposed to amend the compromise in question and add a clause calling for the expertise of the WHO to be used. The latter is a neutral organisation, which is both competent and respected in cases of litigation when it comes to the inclusion of a disease on the list of diseases covered by the future agreement to facilitate access of developing countries to essential medicines.
While waiting for an agreement, Pascal Lamy provides assurances to Member States of the WTO that "in the meantime, and as a purely stop-gap measures, we will ourselves refrain from challenging any Member which would want to export medicines according to the terms and modalities set out in the draft decision o 16 December 2002".