The World Health Organisation has issued a list of recommended AIDS treatments in a bid to ease the access of developing countries to successful drugs.
The agency also added a series of AIDS drugs to its international list of essential medicines which aims to help countries fix their health service priorities.
WHO officials said the aim was to simplify the choices facing countries battling an AIDS epidemic and speed decisions about the most suitable medicines to use.
They should encourage both industrialised and developing country governments to make HIV treatment more widely available, said WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland.
HIV is the virus that can lead to AIDS, which last year killed some three million people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
The WHO estimates that there are some 40 million people worldwide infected with the virus, which can take up to 10 years to manifest itself. More than 90 percent are living in developing countries.
According to the agency, only some five percent of the six million people living with AIDS in developing countries currently have access to treatment.
WHO believes that at least three million people needing care should be able to get medicines by 2005 - a more than ten-fold increase, the agency said in a statement.
Amongst the 12 AIDS treatments added to the list of essential medicines was nevirapine, one of the antiretroviral drugs at the centre of a battle in South Africa over access to AIDS treatment.
The government of President Thabo Mbeki, whose country is one of the most affected by AIDS, had argued that antiretroviral drugs could be more dangerous than the disease itself.
But in a major policy shift, his cabinet today announced that it was preparing to reverse its opposition to drug treatments and extend a mother-to-child prevention programme throughout the country.
WHO officials denied that placing AIDS drugs on the agency's list of essential medicines was intended as a form of political pressure.
This is not aimed at any specific country, said one senior official.
Since AIDS was first reported over two decades ago, over 20 million people have died as a result of HIV infections.