WTO Summit: Don't Undercut AIDS Drug Access

(New York, November 7, 2001) Trade ministers at the upcoming WTO summit
in Doha, Qatar should abandon threats of sanctions against countries
trying to obtain medicines for health emergencies such as HIV/AIDS,
Human Rights Watch said today. The WTO summit will take place from
November 9 to 13.

The part of the WTO agreement dealing with patents, known as TRIPS
(Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), allows
exceptions to patent rules in the case of a national emergency or where
a product will have non-commercial uses. Fifty-developing countries and
Norway are urging the WTO ministers in Doha to make a
pledge not to impede legitimate use of
emergency exceptions to TRIPS. In negotiations leading up to the Doha
summit, the U.S. and a number of other countries that are home to the
major multinational pharmaceutical companies have been intransigent in
opposing this pledge.

The United States has also bilaterally threatened sanctions against
several countries with severe AIDS problems, such as Thailand, South
Africa and Brazil.

"AIDS is already tearing these countries apart," said Joanne Csete,
director of the HIV/AIDS program at Human Rights Watch. "They shouldn't
face sanctions from the developed world on top of that."

Approximately 9,000 persons a day die of AIDS, the large majority in
countries where anti-retroviral drugs are unavailable or unaffordable.
More than 22 million people have died of AIDS, about 18 million of them
in sub-Saharan Africa.

The office of the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick announced
last week that instead of the 53-country proposal reinforcing the health
emergency exceptions in TRIPS, it would support a counter-proposal that
would give "least developed countries" more time until they are required
to be fully compliant with TRIPS and would impose a
five-year moratorium on initiation of WTO complaints against countries
seeking TRIPS exceptions.

Csete noted that the U.S. proposal is a step in the right direction but
would cover only the poorest countries and would not include others such
as Brazil and South Africa that have capacity for domestic production of
generic drugs. She urged the United States not to use bilateral threats
and sanctions when the global system allowed exceptions
that Washington opposed.

The United States, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom have been
granted exceptions to TRIPS and the pre-WTO trade rules many times to
protect their own interests in areas as wide-ranging as pharmaceuticals,
computers, software, and biotechnology innovations. Canada recently said
it would seek a compulsory license - a license to produce and import the
generic version of a brand-name medicine - to ensure its stock of
anti-anthrax drugs. New Zealand, Australia and Italy have also used
compulsory licensing as an antitrust measure.

In contrast, no low-income developing country has succeeded in obtaining
a compulsory license for generic AIDS drugs. The United Nations
Development Programme's "Human Development Report 2001" attributes this
disparity to threats from Europe and the United States of trade
sanctions, loss of foreign direct investment, or litigation against
low-income countries hoping to obtain compulsory licenses. Earlier this
year, for example, the U.S. threatened to put Thailand on "priority
watch" - a disadvantageous trade status - in response to the Thai
government's attempt to shorten the waiting period for production of
generic drugs in Thailand after the release of their brand-name
counterparts. (An estimated 750,000 persons in Thailand suffer from
AIDS.) A similar U.S. action against Brazil, brought through the WTO,
was dropped this year only in the face of heavy international pressure
against the case.

A copy of the letter sent to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick
can be found at http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/11/us-trade-ltr.htm [2].

Copies of the letter sent to the trade ministers of Canada, Germany,
Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom can be found at
http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/11/wto-aids1107.htm [3].

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