While most of the benefits of TRIPS flow to the North, developing countries are still grappling with the understanding, implementation and costs of the agreement. A review of TRIPS and several of its articles is therefore an important part of the re-balancing exercise mentioned above, especially with regard to matters like the access to affordable medicines, technology transfer, traditional knowledge, disclosure of origin, prior informed consent, benefit sharing, patenting of life, non-violation complaints.

However, as with many issues of particular interest to developing countries, very little progress is made in this field, because of the failure of Northern countries, including the EU to look beyond the narrow and private interests of their industries (as is the case in the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) where developing countries have launched a similar agenda in 2004). Even the obvious case of access to affordable medicines has still not found a final and workable solution.

Meanwhile especially the USA, but also the EU is pursuing a “TRIPS plus” agenda in bilateral negotiations outside the WTO imposing more burdensome IP measures upon developing countries, including provisions regarding the exclusivity of test data, which will hinder the introduction of generic medicines.

Demand 6 

The EU must accept amending the TRIPS agreement so as to provides a final, user- friendly and effective solution of the access to medicines problem; it must not pursue TRIPS plus provisions in bilateral agreements; respect developing countries’ need for policy space to adopt IP systems suitable to their level of development and rebalance the TRIPS agreement in favour of public and development and biodiversity interests. Furthermore, the patenting of life must be banned from all trade agreements.

Next demand

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