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Civil society, patient groups call on Japan and South Korea to withdraw harmful proposals from RCEP negotiations
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Ramesh Shankar, Mumbai
February 25 , 2017
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As 16 countries negotiating the Regional Comprehensive Economic
Partnership (RCEP) agreement meet next week in Kobe, Japan, for the
seventeenth round of negotiations, civil society and patient groups,
including the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins
Sans Frontières (MSF), are appealing to the Japanese and South Korean
governments to withdraw harmful proposals that will restrict people’s
access to affordable generic medicines
The civil society and
patient groups stated that while being negotiated behind closed-doors,
Japan and South Korea are aggressively pushing for measures in the RCEP
agreement that would emphasise stronger pharmaceutical corporation power
at the expense of public health, threatening millions of lives
globally.
Started in May 2013, the RCEP is being negotiated
between the 10 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries
and six trading partners, Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand
and South Korea.
“Japan has been advocating for the need to
address high drug prices and the need for access to affordable treatment
at the UN and G7; but the tougher intellectual property provisions it
has been negotiating for in RCEP go against that,” said Jeremie Bodin,
General Director, MSF Japan. “One of the proposals would lengthen patent
monopolies that will lead to unaffordable drug prices for a longer
time, while also undermining fragile health care systems and stifling
the patient-centred research and development required to address
emerging public health challenges.”
The intellectual property
provisions initiated by Japan and South Korea go far beyond the
requirements needed under international trade rules. The proposed
provisions seek to extend pharmaceutical corporations’ patent terms
beyond the usual 20 years, and also would require data exclusivity that
limits competition – even for improved formulations of older medicines
that do not deserve a patent.
Equally disturbing is the proposed
investment chapter which raises the risks of the Indian and ASEAN
governments being sued by pharmaceutical corporations for millions of
dollars in secret tribunal – outside of domestic courts for regulating
the IP system and controlling drug prices in public interest. All of
these provisions are similar to those included in the Trans Pacific
Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, which MSF and many others branded as
the worst trade deal ever for access to medicines.
“The worst
intellectual property provisions of the TPP have been introduced through
the backdoor by Japan in the RCEP negotiations. Measures like patent
term extensions and data exclusivity are another form of ‘evergreening’
monopolies on older medicines, which allows a deadly delay to the
introduction of generic competition and expand the power of
pharmaceutical corporations to charge exorbitant prices,” said Leena
Menghaney, Head-South Asia, MSF Access Campaign.
“The RCEP
negotiators must protect existing public health safeguards that enable
developing countries like India to keep supplying the life-saving
affordable medicines needed to treat millions of people worldwide.”
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