Drug Seizure issue Settled, EU Agrees to Amend Laws.

NEW DELHI/BERLIN: India has resolved the dispute with the European Union over confiscation of Indian generic drugs by countries such as the Netherlands and France, ending uncertainty for Indian pharma firms which use Europe as a transit point for exports to Africa and Latin America.

“The EU has accepted our position and amended its rules,” commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma told reporters on the sidelines of the Ficci-Frauenhofer CEOs Roundtable in Berlin on Thursday. He said India would withdraw the complaint filed at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) against such seizures. “We do not want to be in conflict. There has been realisation and we appreciate the steps, which have been taken. They went to the extent of saying that they were misreading the concerned EU notification,” the minister said.

In the last couple of years, Customs authorities in a number of European countries seized about 17 drug consignments shipped from India en route to various African and Latin American countries. The medicines, which were generics or off-patent in India, were impounded as European companies holding patents for them in their countries had complained to the authorities that they were counterfeit.

India claimed that such seizures flouted multilateral trade rules as the medicines were off-patent both in India and the country where they were being exported. Almost half of India’s drugs exports worth . 40,000 crore are generics.

The Indian industry welcomed the EU decision to amend its customs rules, but said there is need to be cautious. “This is good news, but it could be a strategy by the EU as its intellectual property interests are now covered by the anti-counterfeit trade agreement (ACTA) that it is about to implement with 10 other countries,” DG Shah, secretary general at Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance (IPA) said.

The ACTA being negotiated among 11 countries — the EU, the US, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland, New Zealand, Morocco, Japan, Australia, Korea and Singapore — proposes to widen the scope of protection and setting up higher standards for enforcement of intellectual property rights. It would extend to import, export and in-transit goods and includes infringement of all IPRs. The proposed legislation provides for seizures, confiscation and destruction of devices.

Prathiba Singh, a Delhi-based lawyer who represents Indian drug makers in patent cases against global drug makers, said the government should negotiate to preclude similar actions to seize Indian drugs through any other laws or treaties such as the ACTA before withdrawing its complaint to the WTO. Ficci president Rajan Bharti Mittal said: “We are happy that this dispute has now been resolved, not only because a significant part of our over $5-billion pharma exports was at stake, but there was serious concern about a large number of disadvantaged and poor people being deprived of access to affordable generic medicine.”

In its joint complaint filed against EU’s Customs regulations at the WTO, India pointed out that GATT (the WTO’s former avatar) had specific rules on goods in transit which did not allow such confiscation.

Source : economictimes.indiatimes.com