Apex EU court upholds rules for tobacco warnings
05 May 2016
India is not alone in insisting on more prominent graphic warnings on tobacco products. Europe's highest court upheld tough new tobacco rules on Wednesday, finding that the European Union had the legal right to place restrictions on the sale of electronic cigarettes and to adopt rules requiring cigarette packs to carry graphic images of diseased human organs.
The ruling by the European Court of Justice came on the same day that India's Supreme Court ordered implementation of a rule that health warnings must cover 85 per cent of tobacco product packages (SC says 85% warning on tobacco packages a must)
The new EU rules take effect this month, although the union's 28 member countries have some leeway in how to adopt the measures, which also include a ban on menthol cigarettes.
Although the court ruling cannot be appealed, the tobacco industry, which lobbied against the rules before the European Union voted them into law in 2014, indicated on Wednesday that it would continue to seek to overturn some of the specific elements, including rules meant to remove the marketing allure from cigarette packaging.
Resistance could prove difficult, though, because the court ruled in favour of the tobacco law on all counts.
The European Court of Justice, based in Luxembourg, had been asked by Poland, Romania and several English courts to determine whether the 2014 legislation, which updated rules for the sale of tobacco and e-cigarettes, was lawful.
''The new EU directive on tobacco products is valid,'' the court found. ''The extensive standardization of packaging, the future EU-wide prohibition on menthol cigarettes and the special rules for electronic cigarettes are lawful.''
The Court of Justice interprets European Union law to ensure it is applied evenly across the bloc, and it settles disputes brought by claimants who believe the bloc's laws have violated their rights.
Poland, which has one of the world's highest rates of menthol cigarette consumption, had argued that the rules were unfair to its smokers, and Romania supported its challenge. The tobacco industry, led by Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco, had challenged plain-packaging rules in Britain, where the courts passed the matter to the Court of Justice.
The court found that the 2014 tobacco law was meant to ''facilitate the smooth functioning of the internal market'' in Europe, while providing a high standard of protection for human health. The court also noted that such regulation was necessary under Europe's international treaty obligations as a party to the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
The court ruled that the European Union had not overstepped its bounds in limiting the nicotine content of e-cigarettes to 20 per cent of the liquid that is used in them and imposing bans on e-cigarette advertising similar to those affecting traditional tobacco products. The court noted that the new regulatory system for e-cigarettes is, in fact, less strict than that governing tobacco.
Totally Wicked, a British maker of electronic cigarettes, had challenged the European regulations, arguing in part that vaping - as use of e-cigarettes is known - is safer than smoking. That argument recently received support in Britain from the Royal College of Physicians.
Totally Wicked said in a statement after Wednesday's court ruling that the new regulations would ''adversely impact the availability of good quality electronic cigarettes and e-liquids, and jeopardize the life-changing potential of vaping, resulting in a major detrimental impact on the public health of millions of people across the EU.''
In the United States, e-cigarettes are now a multibillion-dollar market. They have gained popularity faster than the federal government has managed to regulate them. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration proposed ways to bring them under federal oversight, including banning their sale to people under 18, but has not yet published final rules that would put the measures into practice.