| Summary: | In South Africa 1 000 people die of AIDS everyday and 100 000 more people require ARVs every year. There is therefore an urgent need to provide access to ARVs andother essential medicines. The South African Constitution requires the government totake reasonable measures to ensure access to health care. The government has cited financial constraints as the major ohstacle to fulfilling this constitutional imperative.
In an effort to stretch their budgetary resource other medium-income countries have used measures such as compulsory licences, voluntary licences and parallel importation. These measures, provided for in the TRIPS Agreement and the Doha Declaration, are available under South African legislation but have not been properly implemented due to a lack of political will. The proper use of compulsory licences by the South African government is vital because all twelve of the ARVs on the World Health Organisation's Essential Medicines List are protected in South Africa by our patent laws. However, in order to issue compulsory licences more easily and quickly the South African Legislature will need to pass legislation which clarifies the ambiguities contained in TRIPS and the Doha Declaration. Other methods to lower the price of medicines include the segmentation of the South African market in order to facilitate differential pricing. The State must balance its use of such measures with programmes to incentivise
research and development into neglected diseases and HIV/AIDS. Such programmes will also assist the State's capacity to conduct its own research and development into new medicines, whilst bolstering its domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity. The ultimate solution to South Africa's access to medicine problem is to create a pharmaceutical manufacturing industry capable of producing the most complex medicines, so as to lessen its dependence on drug manufacturers reducing their prices.
The way to create a sophisticated pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity is to use the flexibilities in TRIPS and to uphold South Africa's high patent standards. The Constitutional Court's involvement is essential in order to force the State to implement its own policies so as to provide access to affordable medicines. === Thesis (LL.M.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.
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