Report Commissioned By EU Parliament Members Shows ACTA Will Increase Health Risks Worldwide
from the signing-on-to-kill-people dept

The members of the Green Party in the EU Parliament commissioned a report to look at the public health impact of ACTA. A draft of that report has been released and it warns of potentially severe negative impacts on public health. At issue: it will force member countries, including developing nations (which even WIPO has admitted are better off with more lax patent rules in order to deal with public health issues) to ratchet up enforcement of patents. Thus it is likely to "negatively impact public health worldwide." The report also points out that part of the problem is the secretive nature in which ACTA was negotiated, in which those who would have warned them of these public health problems were excluded from the negotiations. Furthermore, the report notes that the process ignored nine specific demands from the EU Parliament for transparency. The whole thing is a condemnation of ACTA, and should raise serious questions about why any country would sign on.