The impact of FTAs on public health policies and TRIPS flexibilities

This paper, after providing a brief historical overview of the ways international agreements deal with public health-related IPRs, analyses the TRIPS-plus trend in Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and its impact on access-to-medicines policies. It focuses on FTAs concluded by the USA and the Member states of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) with a number of developing countries and their provisions on patents and test data protection. New obligations in this field go well beyond the TRIPS minimum standards and may seriously affect access in developing countries to affordable generic pharmaceutical products.