63

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership project, known as the TTIP, covers various industrial sectors, including pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Its aim is fundamentally of a commercial, economic nature, with negotiators seeking to create a transatlantic health market, i.e. a geographical area within which health products will circulate more easily than elsewhere, due in particular to the lowering of the many technical trade barriers (non-tariff barriers) in the sector. In other words, the project seeks to create a market similar to an internal one. To do so, i.e. to reduce or even eliminate non-tariff barriers, the project proposes primarily to develop regulatory cooperation between the American (the Food and Drug Administration) and the European (European Medicines Agency) agencies, in those sectors, so as to eliminate duplication and administrative complications, and thus facilitate trade. It is nevertheless necessary to examine the scope of this regulatory cooperation and its modalities and limits, in order to determine its potential consequences on states’ regulatory autonomy and on the legitimacy of governments’ regulations in the area of health. One issue is whether such regulatory cooperation is thought out and organized in favor of the pharmaceutical companies’ private interests alone or whether it takes into account other considerations, in particular non-commercial ones that are favorable to citizens and consumers’ interests, hitherto barely or not at all dealt with at the multilateral level.