India ready to move WTO against EU Customs laws

India is ready to file a case against the EU’s Customs regulations at the World Trade Organisation, as talks have failed to resolve the issue of wrongful confiscation of Indian generic medicines at European airports, a government official has said. India has all its documents required for filing the case ready and is now awaiting approval from the Brazilian authorities before it jointly approaches the WTO.

“Earlier this year, we felt that the EU was serious about bringing about some changes in its regulations, which could address our problem. But we are disappointed,” the official said.

EU’s former trade commissioner Katherine Ashton, during her visits to India last year, had given assurances that the EU would sort out the issue bilaterally with India. Following on the promise, in January this year, the EU had said that it would make alterations in its customs regulations or its application in a way that shipments of generics from India on the way to third countries would not get confiscated at European ports for violation of patent laws of the European countries.

Once Brazil, which had jointly raised its voice with India against EU’s customs regulations, gets the required approval domestically for filing the case, both countries would request the WTO for setting up of a panel to hear the dispute. India has appointed intellectual property experts to prepare the case against the EU and is confident of a favourable verdict at the WTO. “We are very clear that customs officials in the EU countries bent WTO rules when they seized good quality off patent medicines being shipped from India. We won’t have a problem proving our case,” the official said.

Over the past one year, a number of reputed Indian drug producers including Dr Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd and Aurobindo Pharma Ltd had their consignments seized in countries like Netherlands and France, following complaints made by European pharmaceutical companies that hold European patents to these medicines.

“Such seizures violate the provisions of Trips (international intellectual property law) agreement,” the official said pointing out that while the European countries had granted patents for those medicines to global pharma companies, they were off-patent in India.

Moreover, the drugs that were confiscated were life-saving medicines being exported to countries in Latin America and Africa, which did not have enough capacities to manufacture these and such transactions are permitted under the Trips and public health agreement.

Africa and Latin America are major markets for India’s low cost drugs used for treatment of diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The two continents account for around 15% of India’s total pharmaceutical exports of nearly Rs 40,000 crore.