An international agreement to address counterfeiting is being drafted amongst the US, the EU, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is being negotiated behind closed doors, and in some cases industry groups have been given special access to the details of the negotiations while public interest groups are shut out of the process.
In spite of the fact that closed negotiations have made it difficu lt for public health advocates to offer a technical analysis, public health groups have indicated concern that ACTA may negatively impact on access to medicines.
If the scope of ACTA aims to address the issue of counterfeit medicines and at the same time encompasses intellectual property (IP) broadly and includes patents then the ACTA enforcement regime has the potential to restrict the use of IP-related safeguards for access to medicines such as compulsory licensing and parallel importing. Any approach that an enforcement regime takes to remove counterfeit medicines from markets should be tailored such that it does not negatively influence the use of safeguards by governments and third parties that aim to secure access to medicines.