In 1996, a group of NON-governmental health ORGANIZATIONS (NGOs) met in Bielefeld, Germany, to discuss the impact on public health of the new intellectual property rules introduced by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) was part of the WTO treaties concluded in 1994 and did not enter into force until 1995. The negotiations that led to TRIPS were mainly motivated by the commercial and commercial interests of industrialized countries [7,8]. While negotiators from developing countries have maintained some flexibilities in the agreement, such as. B transitional periods of implementation in developing countries, TRIPS did not focus globally on public health and civil society organizations were not part of the negotiation process. World Health Organization. (2020). The Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. Available at: www.who.int/medicines/areas/policy/doha_declaration/en/ (access: January 4, 2020). TRIPS has put an end to this diversity by requiring all members to introduce 20-year patents in all fields of technology; In practice, this requirement meant that many developing countries had to offer patents on pharmaceutical products for the first time. As TRIPS was part of the WTO package, countries wishing to remain members of the WTO could not withdraw from TRIPS or make reservations about the treaty (unlike many other international agreements). In the following years, a wave of IP reforms took place in most developing countries in response to ad hoc commitments [32].
The policy space that countries once enjoyed to design IP systems in line with their development needs had been significantly reduced. At the signing of the agreement in Nairobi, President and CEO Prakash Patel said the door to access to life-saving medicines for the people of Kenya and East Africa will now be open. (38) Cosmos will be the second largest African producer of generic ARV medicines, after the South African company Aspen Pharmacare, which announced a similar approach in early 2004. Cosmos Industries obtained its license from Glaxo SmithKline in 2004. Growing dissatisfaction with the impact of TRIPS on public health culminated at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle in 1999 with the call to “humanize trade agreements.” Supporters of civil society and governments in developing countries began to form a strong coalition and insisted that measures such as compulsory licenses be used to accelerate the production and availability of inexpensive generic HIV/AIDS drugs, without the risk of trade retaliation. Malpani, R. (2007). All costs, no benefits: How the TRIPS Plus rules on intellectual property in the US-Jordan Free Trade Agreement impact access to medicines. Oxfam International, p.2.
Available at: oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/114080/bp102-all-costs-no-benefits-trips-210307-de.pdf?sequence=1 (access: January 6, 2020). According to Jing Chen et al. (2013), for example, China was placed on the USTR Office`s (USTR) Priority List, a report that identifies countries with an IP regulation that does not meet the minimum standards set by the TRIPS Agreement. According to the report, there is a need to amend the national IP regulation in order to tackle a large number of IP issues, including barriers to pharmaceutical innovation. The United States has filed a complaint with the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism (DSM) over China`s IP rules, putting pressure on the country to correct its IP regulations by transposing the TRIPS Plus provisions into its domestic law. . . .