Hundreds of civil society groups, concerned with access to medicines, have urged the members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to honour their obligation under Article 66.1 of the TRIPS Agreement and unconditionally accord to the Least Developed Countries (LDC) the requested extension of the LDC transition period for implementation of TRIPS Agreement.

The current transition period expires on July 1, 2013 and the TRIPS Council meets next week to take a decision on this issue.

A total of 376 organisations appealed to the WTO members to support and agree at the upcoming meetings of the TRIPS Council to the draft decision text presented by the LDC Group that: “Least developed country Members shall not be required to apply the provisions of the Agreement, other than Articles 3, 4 and 5, until they cease to be a least developed country Member”.

Approving the LDC group request for extension would also effectively extend the waiver issued to LDCs with regard to pharmaceutical products (due to expire in 2016). LDCs suffer from multiple disease burdens. For instance most LDCs are from sub-Saharan Africa, which has a high concentration of AIDS epidemic. Thus the request is important to the continued ability of LDC to access affordable generic medicines of assured quality for HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and other infectious, neglected, and non-communicable diseases and to allow LDCs to develop local pharmaceutical capacity. Indeed, LDC Members, could fill an important pharmaceutical niche by manufacturing newer medicines now patented in key producer countries like India, all of which were required to become TRIPS-compliant in 2000 or 2005, the civil society groups said.

WTO members do not attach to the extension decision any conditions and limitations that limit the policy space and flexibility available to LDCs under Article 66.1 of TRIPS, such as those contained in paragraph 5 of IP/C/40, the groups said and stressed that any attempt to weaken or to refuse LDCs rights that they are entitled to under the TRIPS Agreement will damage the credibility of the WTO as it will show that the multilateral trading system is unable to benefit the poorest and most vulnerable segment of the international community.

On behalf of the LDC members of the WTO, Haiti had recently submitted a request to extend the transition period for LDCs to implement the TRIPS Agreement. The TRIPS Agreement sets out minimum standards for intellectual property (IP) protection and enforcement that all WTO members must implement in their national laws. When it was signed TRIPS granted transition periods for both developing and LDCs. LDCs initial transition period was to have expired in 2005, but an extension was granted in 2005 until June 30, 2013.

There is a growing recognition that TRIPS rules will undermine human rights, development and health in developing countries and this would be starkest if people in LDCs - the most vulnerable economies in the world- were suddenly required to provide and maintain monopolies on essential goods, they said.

“We are of the view that failure by the TRIPS Council to grant LDCs an extension would be disastrous for LDC Members and their citizens. LDCs would immediately need to amend their intellectual property laws to become TRIPS-compliant and would be under extreme time pressures to do so. Much worse, they would be adopting high standards of intellectual property protection and enforcement before they have had any real domestic technological capacity and before a significant body of local inventors, authors, and creators could leverage a domestic intellectual property system to their advantage,” the civil society groups in their appeal to the WTO members said.