When Health Prevails Trade
Nillsuwan
The issue attracted international organizations and non-state actors such as UNAIDS, Consumer Project on Technology, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF/ Doctors Without Borders), The Global Fund, Health GAP and the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue Working Group on Intellectual Property. UNAIDS supported the sovereign rights of member states regarding fighting and ending HIV/AIDS. These actors took part in calling on the U.S. and the European Community to respect the 2001 Doha Declaration and asserted that the Declaration must not make CLs a “last resort.” They supported the financing, Thailand’s sovereignty right, and the CL legality for the country’s public health programs, without a requirement for prior consultations or negotiations supervised by the U.S. and the European governments (PIJIP 2009; Institute for Population 2009). Domestically, the Health System Research Institute (NSRI) funded a research project on ‘Evergreening medicine patents in Thailand.’ As a part of the project, the researchers published a ‘Manual for Examination of Pharmaceutical Patents’ that was given to the Department of Intellectual Property of Thailand to use as a guide for preventing the inappropriate granting of patents. This project was based on and largely referred to the reference guide of WHO Southeast Asia (WHO 2009) and the guidelines developed by the International Center for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), UNCTAD and WHO (Correa 2007). The effects of regime-shifting finally turned back to the primary governing institution of the global IP in trade rules. Pascal Lamy, the then Director-General of WTO, finally addressed the 11th Annual International Generic Pharmaceutical Alliance Conference in Geneva in 2008. The director-general recognized the ‘need to find a balance within the intellectual property system, as well as the use of some of the TRIPS flexibilities by certain WTO member states (WTO 2008). This paper considers two levels of actions for regime-shifting. One level is the international level: to handle the confusion about the legitimacy of the CLs, it was crucial for the Thai government to be active in seeking supports for these CLs decision officially. The mission was mainly led by the incumbent high-ranking officers in the Ministry of Public Health who sought support from key individuals in the United States. Meanwhile, civil society groups and activists brought the issue to other areas for discussion, such as the human rights, public health, and customer rights forum. The intention was to challenge the existing controversy in the global IPR regime, especially with regard to medicines, so that WTO member states can widen the space for selecting how to interpret IPR rules. International and domestic non-state actors proved to play important roles in global IPR policy making. Their movements and strategies in informal venues or channels could be influential, as they provide normative justifications, the rationale for social or moral purposes of an action and bring the issues to public attention to influence other actors to consent with them.
Asian Journal of Public Affairs | 2018
15