Geneva: The United Nations High Level Panel on Access to Medicines (UNHLP) has urged governments to use “flexibilities” accorded to them in the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS agreement to ensure that patents for life-saving drugs are only awarded for “genuine innovation”. TRIPS flexibilities involve “the freedom to determine patentability criteria” and include concepts such as “novelty”, “incentive step” and “industrial applicability”. Recently, the government announced IPR policy guidelines in the face of intense lobbying by powerful pharmaceutical companies in major industrialized countries. “This pressure undermines the efforts of states to meet their human rights and public health obligations,” the panel said. These include amending laws to curtail the evergreening of patents and awarding patents only when genuine innovation has occurred.

Source: Mint September 14, 2016 19:41 UTC