The case will go before the nearest thing to a world court with teeth - the WTO in Geneva. Campaigners cite Brazil as a successful example of how a relatively poor country can treat Aids if it has access to cheaper generic drugs. Aids deaths have halved since the government began providing cut-price treatment. Merck and Pfizer, the companies leading the campaign against Brazil's generics industry, must be re-evaluating their strategy. But it will be harder for big drugs companies to admit defeat on this one.
Brazil is different.
More significantly for the world, if the Trips tribunal backs Brazil, it will establish the principle that poor countries can override patent rules in the interests of public health. Campaigners now want the safeguard rules in Trips to be clarified and trade negotiators to revisit the whole issue of patent protection in poor countries when the WTO discusses intellectual property rules in September. Ominously for the drugs companies and their shareholders, the South Africa case and the forthcoming showdown in Geneva raise uncomfortable questions about big pharmaceutical companies' lack of financial transparency. The arguments in favour of patents on drugs, which give corporations long monopolies on their production and sale, centre on the cost of the research needed to invent the medicine in the first place. The companies say they need worldwide patent protection to recoup the millions spent on developing the drug.