Own Correspondent, Pretoria | Wednesday
THE world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies have been forced onto the defensive in their court action to stop South Africa importing cheap generic drugs, with the judge adjourning the trial to let the country’s leading Aids advocacy group make its case.
In a landmark legal battle, the 39 drug firms are challenging a law that will allow the government to import and produce drugs, including anti-retrovirals, that are cheaper than the companies’ brand-name drugs.
The 39 local and international companies claim that this will override their patent rights and put the entire industry at risk.
The court Tuesday decided to allow a local body representing HIV/Aids sufferers to make a special submission in support of the law and then postponed the case for five weeks to allow the companies time to respond to it.
“The drug companies have to answer to us,” Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) chairman Zackie Achmat triumphantly told TAC supporters outside the Pretoria High Court.
“For the first time, the pharmaceutical industry will have to justify to South Africa and to the world why their drug prices are so high and why their patents should be so aggressively protected when millions of people are dying and cheaper drugs exist,” national and international organisations said in a joint statement after the ruling.
The trial has seen activists from around the world come to South Africa to protest in support of the government. They argue that manufacturers are blocking the treatment of millions of people around the world by refusing to allow cheap copies of its patented products to be manufactured in poor countries.
Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF – Doctors Without Borders), Oxfam and the Congress of South African Trade Unions were among these organisations which welcomed Judge Bernard Ngoepe’s decision to accept evidence from TAC.
But they condemned the pharmaceutical industry for first trying to block TAC’s submission and then for requesting about four months to reply to it.
Legal counsel for the companies, advocate Fanie Cillers, said the patent system was key to the survival of the drug industry. “The whole survival of the industry is dependent on the survival of its patent protection.” – AFP
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