World Combined Sources

COPENHAGEN - Countries must have the right to buy AIDS medication at an affordable price. That call was issued in Copenhagen March 5 by the leader of trade unions in the world's pharmaceutical industry.

Fred Higgs, general secretary of the 20-million-strong International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers' Unions (ICEM), was speaking as a crucial court case opened in South Africa.

Developing countries' access to medicines is at issue in the test case between the South African government and 39 big pharmaceutical companies.

To protect their patents, the major drug corporations are asking the court to stop the implementation of a South African law aimed at providing cheaper medication. The law would permit the country's health minister to use parallel importation of drugs, compulsory licensing and generic substitution where necessary.

Application of this act has already been delayed for several years by the legal wrangles. The measure is particularly important to the fight against HIV/AIDS in South Africa, which has one of the world's highest rates of HIV infection.

"As part of the ICEM's program to combat HIV/AIDS, we believe that South Africa and other countries must have the right to buy the appropriate pharmaceuticals at prices that they can afford," said Higgs. He was in South Africa last week at an ICEM conference where African and Asian unions adopted a program of action on HIV/AIDS.

"We hope that the South African courts will defend South Africa's rights in this regard," Higgs added. "We ask ICEM-affiliated unions to express their support for the South African government's position." ICEM affiliates include pharmaceutical workers' unions worldwide.

Higgs was speaking at the congress of the ICEM-affiliated Danish Women Workers' Union (KAD), which is celebrating its centenary this year. Over 1,000 delegates were attending the congress.

On the same day, more than 100 people demonstrated outside the U.S. Consulate in Cape Town to voice their anger at the bid by drug companies to block the import of generic drugs.

The demonstrators were members of the Treatment Action Campaign, an AIDS activists group, and its ally, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. They brandished placards including one that read "Life before patents."

"This case is one of the most important things that is going to happen in Africa and for countries in Asia and Latin America," said Zackie Achmat, chairman of the Treatment Action Campaign.

More than 25 million of the 36 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world's most impoverished regions. In 2000, 2.4 million people in the region died from the effects of AIDS.

With little access to the medicines that have turned AIDS from a fatal to a chronic disease in the West, the overwhelming majority of these people - and the millions infected in other poor countries - will die from the disease.

To help fight the disease, which now afflicts about 10 percent of South Africa's 45 million people, the country passed a law in 1997 giving the health minister a limited right to import generic versions of patented drugs or license their domestic production. The law has never been used.

The pharmaceutical manufacturers sued in 1998, arguing the law was too broad and unfairly targeted drug manufacturers over other patent holders. The case could take a year to resolve.