From Poverty to Power Green, Oxfam 2008 - weman

5 THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM TRADINGThe TRIPS agreement allowed some flexibility for developingcountries to override patent rules to protect public health, but thispromptly degenerated into a legal battleground as rich corporationsand countries turned to the courts in an effort to restrict them fromdoing so. In 2001, a group of 39 of the world’s largest pharmaceuticalcompanies took the South African government to court over the termsof its 1997 Medicines Act. At that time around 4.5 million people inSouth Africa were infected with the HIV virus, but the vast majority ofthem did not have access to effective treatment, in part due to theextremely high prices of ARVs. Other problems included the highlyunequal health infrastructure inherited from the apartheid period,lack of finance, and lack of political will in some sections of thegovernment to tackle HIV and AIDS.The companies decided to pursue legal proceedings despite thedevastation caused by South Africa’s public health crisis, sparkinginternational condemnation. They argued that the Medicines Act,which allowed ‘parallel imports’ (imports of cheaper patentedmedicines), breached the TRIPS agreement, when in fact TRIPS isneutral on this issue. Citizen campaigns (spearheaded by the TreatmentAction Campaign and including a global campaign by Oxfam andMSF) and public uproar became such a serious threat to the drugcompanies’ reputations that they dropped the lawsuit.The case also helped to galvanise the passage of the DohaDeclaration on TRIPS and Public Health, agreed upon by all WTOmembers prior to the start of a new round of global trade negotiationsin November 2001. The Doha Declaration unequivocally recognisedthat the TRIPS agreement ‘can and should be interpreted and implementedin a manner supportive of WTO members’ right to protectpublic health, and in particular, to promote access to medicines for all’.The legal clarity of the Doha Declaration, combined with the badpublicity from the episode, motivated some drug companies to stopopposing the import or local production of generic antiretroviralmedicines, and to offer some of their ARVs and other medicines atlower or ‘no-profit’ prices in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet such ad hocinitiatives have mostly been limited to a few high-profile diseases(in addition to HIV and AIDS, TB and malaria), and even for thosediseases have fallen short.329