E-drug: Act Up-Paris confronts EU Trade Commissioner
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Press release - November 27 2002
Act Up-Paris zaps the EU Trade Commissioner:
let poor countries access generic medicines !
November 27 2002, activists from people-with-aids group Act
Up-Paris interrupted a speech by EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy at
a conference on globalisation in Louvain, Belgium, to demand that Mr
Lamy stop blocking access to generic medicines for poor countries.
In a complete U-turn from his promises of a year ago in Doha, Trade
Commissioner Lamy is this very week pushing in the WTO TRIPS Council
the hard-line agenda of pharmaceutical transnational corporations, in
contempt of the lives of the 40 millions people who will die within
the next 8 years if deprived of accessible HIV medication.
Thus, Pascal Lamy is using his public mandate to defend corporate
interests aiming at :
- limiting access to generic medicines for poor countries to only those
diseases that threaten not individuals but the entire country, thereby
excluding 99% of existing medicines which will end up being reserved
for the inhabitants of the wealthy nations;
- denying poor countries the right to import not only affordable medicines
but also affordable diagnostics and medical devices, without which doctors
are unable to provide any medical care;
- turning the World Trade Organisation into a global generic drug
police, by forcing the undeveloped countries that need to import the
generics, to
notify the WTO and ask for permission, whereas big, developed
countries that can manufacture the drugs themselves will not have to
notify anyone or ask for anything;
- among rich countries, reserving access to generics to very big and
highly developed countries like the US - those that boast capacity
for making every drug under the sun - by excluding rich countries
from accessing generics via imports (resulting in a situation where
the US could access generic versions of the Cipro anthrax drug but
Singapore or Portugal could not);
People with diseases from all across the world and their organisations ask
that Trade Commissioner Lamy immediately cease to support the
transnational corporations and start supporting impoverished people
with diseases and their governments' proposals in the WTO.
If Mr Lamy, in spite of every basic human value, again chooses to
maintain this policy of blocking access, it will then befall the
Heads of State and Government of the European Union to put an end to
the criminal action he is taking in the name of all European voters,
before the negotiation ongoing in the WTO until late December comes
to an end.
Act Up-Paris
Media contact : Khalil Elouardighi / Mederic Pouye : + 33 6 1047 8371
www.actupp.org
Khalil Elouardighi <gerrold@noos.fr>
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