20/11/2015 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
In Paris on 24 November the PACE Committee on Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development is organising a parliamentary conference on the MEDICRIME Convention, the Council of Europe’s treaty on the counterfeiting of medical products and similar crimes involving threats to public health.
The aim of the conference is to raise parliamentarians’ awareness of the issue of counterfeit medical products and their negative impact on public health by focusing on the scope and objectives of the Convention and to incite the national parliaments of the 47 member States and worlwide to ratify the Convention.
The participants will include Christiane Etévé-Mousset and Catherine Petit, from the Association of Women with P.I.P. prostheses (France), Claude Chirac, Vice-President of the Chirac Foundation (France), Domenico Di Giorgio, Director of the Office for Product Quality and Counterfeiting, Italian Medicines Agency (Italy), Carlos María Romeo Casabona, Professor in Criminal Law, University of Deusto (Spain) and Bastiaan Venhuis, Senior Scientific Officer, National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (Netherlands).
The conference will begin at 9.30 am at the OECD Conference Centre (2, rue André Pascal, Paris). It is being organised in conjunction with the Directorate General of Human Rights and Rule of Law and the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines and Healthcare of the Council of Europe.
The Council of Europe’s MEDICRIME Convention, which aims to combat the counterfeiting of medical products and protect public health, will enter into force on 1st January 2016. This Convention is the first legally binding international instrument making criminal offences of the counterfeiting, manufacture and supply of medical products marketed without authorisation or without complying with safety standards. It provides for not only criminal-law penalties, but also prevention and victim-protection measures.