The Treatment Action Campaign has issued a Briefing providing a great summary of the campaign launched last year trying to convince/force the S. Africa government to adopt TRIPS-compliant flexibilities in its patent regime and thereafter to use them to increase access to medicines: http://www.tac.org.za/community/node/3241.
People should also take a look at the wonderful Equal Treatment magazine that TAC produced about this campaign.
This is an inspiring example of efforts, ten-years after the Doha Declaration to get developing countries to adopt the flexibilities that activists helped to win. Strict patent regimes, opportunities for patent oppositions, easy-to-use procedures for compulsory licenses all have an important role to play in countering the offensives of Big Pharma and US and EU trade negotiators to gain broader, stronger, and longer patent and data monopolies and to push an enforcement and anti-counterfeiting agenda that chokes off the supply of low-cost medicines of assured quality.
This campaign was spawned out a network of activists in Southern and East Africa who brainstormed IP related campaigns and also out of a two-week short course for activists and others taught at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa, where three full days was devoted to developing the outline of this and other campaigns.
