Third world access to essential medicines and the WTO general council decision of 2003

Abstract

Following the Implementation of Paragraph 6 of the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and public health, Canada was the first developed country to amend its patent law, which resulted in Canada's Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR). The CAMR allowed manufacturers to manufacture generic drugs domestically and export them to developing countries with insufficient manufacturing capacity. This paper uses the case of Rwanda, which was the first developing country to take advantage of this legislation, in order to analyse how effective the CAMR and the Paragraph 6 Agreement were in ensuring that developing countries could access generic drugs