Defending the Spirit of the Doha Declaration in Free Trade Agreements : The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Access to Affordable Medicines

The Doha Declaration on the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and Public Health is a strong political statement, which further confirms the interpretative value of TRIPS. According to Paragraph 4 of the Doha Declaration, Members can and should interpret and implement TRIPS in a manner supportive of their own rights to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. The ‘spirit of Doha' represents this broad consensus of the international community that governments are not only entitled to but have a duty to use the necessary public policy health safe guards – so called TRIPS flexibilities – that are necessary to protect public health and promote access to affordable medicines.The recent rise of bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) threatens public health and access to affordable medicines. FTAs usually include provisions that mandate an increased level of intellectual property protection and strengthened terms of enforcement.The United States Trade Representative (USTR) is currently negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a multilateral free trade agreement with twelve countries in the Asia Pacific region. The negotiations include the U.S., Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei.The intellectual property chapter proposed by USTR includes measures harmful to access to affordable medicines that have not been seen before in previous FTAs, which make the TPP especially dangerous for generic competition and limit public health policy space in the Asia-Pacific region and disregard the spirit of Doha Declaration