Nearly two months after Argentine patent expert Carlos M Correa complained about the misinterpretation of his observations to conclude an expert group report on Indian patent laws, the chairman of the Technical Expert Group (TEG), R A Mashelkar, clarified that the report’s conclusions were not based on Correa’s views, but on TEG’s own interpretations.
In response to a Business Standard query, Mashelkar, former chief of the Council of Industrial and Scientific Research (CSIR), said Correa’s views were used merely as a reference and TEG conclusions were not solely based on his (Correa’s) words.
What provoked Mashelkar’s response was an explanatory note put out by Correa in an international e-discussion group “ip-health” a few days ago. Correa had said that TEG had “cited extensively” his report to support its conclusion that it would not be compatible with the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, or TRIPS, (of World Trade Organization) to limit the grant of pharmaceutical substances to new chemical entities.
Countering this argument, Mashelkar said TEG’s conclusions were exclusively based on its own independent research and analysis. “TEG’s legal interpretations on TRIPS compatibility issues raised in the terms of reference benefited immensely from the thoughtful judgements provided by two legal luminaries of India, Madhav Menon, who has been recently hailed as ‘living legend of law’ and Moolchand Sharma, the vice-chairman of UGC,” Mashelkar stated.
Mashelkar also added that the TEG had arrived at its conclusion up-front even before it started mentioning Correa’s reports. According to him, Correa’s report was sighted because it was one of the few exhaustive studies dealing with TRIPS and pharmaceuticals.
Incidentally, Correa and Mashelkar were both members of the Commission on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Public Health (CIPIH), established by the World Health Assembly (of WTO) six years ago.
Meanwhile, renowned access-to-medicine proponent Brook K Baker has supported Correa’s view and alleged that the Mashelkar report has underestimated India’s right to define patentability standard. The complaint, posted on http://www.healthgap.org, the website of an organsation of US-based AIDS and human rights activists on October 9, said the report incorrectly analyses India’s flexibilities under TRIPS to define pro-health standards of patentability and fails to analyse key TRIPS-minimum patent standards. Baker also says the report misinterprets and misapplies the expert analysis of Correa.
