GENEVA (Reuters) – India and Brazil will take the European Union to court at the World Trade Organisation, diplomats said yesterday, raising the stakes in a bitter dispute over seizures of generic drugs. WTO ambassadors from the two emerging powers told Reuters their governments had decided to request consultations with the EU in the row, the first step in launching a formal trade dispute.
Developing countries believe the case, originally involving the seizure by Dutch customs of a blood pressure drug en route from India to Brazil last December, is a symbol of their mistreatment by rich nations and corporations.
It also sums up a major dilemma in trade and intellectual property policy — how to reconcile the provision of affordable medicine to people in poor countries with the need to encourage medical research through patent protection.
“We’ve taken the decision to launch consultations,” India’s WTO ambassador Ujal Singh Bhatia told Reuters. “We’re just completing the procedural work.”
“As of now the decision in Brasilia is to move forward,” Brazil’s WTO ambassador Roberto Azevedo said.
The two have not yet decided when to notify the request formally to the WTO, as they continue to prepare the case.
In a report this week, campaign groups Oxfam and Health Action International accused Europe of double standards by cracking down on medicine prices at home while undermining access to cheap drugs in poor countries.
Since late 2008, Dutch and German officials have made customs seizures totalling 19 shipments of generic medicines bound for developing countries, Oxfam and HAI said. Elise Ford, Oxfam head of EU advocacy, said the action would result in higher medicine prices in developing countries, just as the European Commission was stepping up its own campaign to ensure access to cheap generics within EU member states. European antitrust regulators have launched a series of raids of pharmaceutical companies since January 2008 in a bid to uncover potentially illegal blocks on generics, which they suspect are pushing up costs for EU healthcare systems.
India and Brazil say last December’s seizure, which has since been repeated, is part of a pattern by rich nations to claw back special treatment agreed for poor countries.
