On 17 November 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union
("CJEU"), in delivering three rulings in
a series of cases in the names of Bayer Intellectual Property
GmbH v. Kohlpharma, Novartis v. Abacus Medicine A/S, and MSD,
Novartis, Ferring and Lundbeck v. Abacus Medicine, Paranova and
2CARE4 ApS (C-204/20, C-147/20 and C-224/20, (the
"Three Cases")) clarified that the
Member States have no discretion to impose that parallel imported
medicinal products must, as a general rule, be repackaged instead
of relabelled and it provided for two exceptions to this principle
of relabelling rather than repackaging where there is a strong
resistance from a significant proportion of consumers in the import
market to acquiring (i) relabelled medicinal products or (ii)
medicinal products with outer packaging which has visible traces of
tampering.
