Nineteen AIDs and public interest groups from India, Thailand, Malaysia, Kenya, and Costa Rica represented by Sean Flynn of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property filed a complaint July 26th with Anand Grover, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, alleging that the Special 301 Report is being used to threaten countries into complying with higher standards than required by international agreements, raising the cost of medicines unfairly.

The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) annually releases its “Special 301” Report on the adequacy and effectiveness of U.S. trading partners’ protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). Those countries with lowest rankings are often threatened with sanctions.

The complaint alleges that this is beyond the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) which includes a range of permissible limitations and exceptions, including rights to use compulsory licenses to break patent monopolies, rights to define criteria for patentability to limit the grant of patents for products that are not sufficiently innovative, rights to allow generic firms to use the registration data of originator firms to speed regulatory approval, and the lack of any duty to \"link\" registration and patent review processes in ways that can slow generic approval.

Threatening countries into complying with higher standards than required by international agreements is adversely affecting access to medicines especially in low and middle income countries, the complaint alleges.