Patent Law and Public Health under the TRIPS Agreement Standards: How Does Vietnam Benefit from the WTO Membership?

Being a full-fledged WTO member from January 2007, Vietnam started to gradually open its pharmaceutical market from 1 January 2007 with drug tariff reduction and to allow the foreign pharmaceutical companies to open their branches in Vietnam. Consequently, as the level of productions of drugs remains low, the price of pharmaceutical products in Vietnam's market depends largely on the international market and foreign pharmaceutical companies. Indeed, these challenges require Vietnam to find solutions and one of them would be a legal response to the problems. The time has come to review the existing legal framework for pharmaceutical products and devise some ways of addressing the problems without undermining the obligations arising out of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and patent law concerning access to medicine and the price, importation and production of drugs in Vietnam. For this, an analysis of the manner in which the TRIPS Agreement provisions on patents have been implemented is called for so that some suggestions on how to use the provisions of "the TRIPS Agreement exceptions'' and the TRIPS Agreement amendments could be made in order to improve the access to medicine by the people of Vietnam regardless of their level of income.