UPDATE – 3rd November 2025 – we’ve now seen the version of the paper that will be discussed by EU Ambassadors on Wednesday. Possible bans on safer nicotine products are still part of the text.
When EU negotiations go late into the night, it invariably means “we can’t agree on something”. That’s exactly what happened at yesterday’s meeting of EU countries to determine the bloc’s position on the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which will be discussed later in the month at the UN in Geneva. There is no white smoke yet, and apparently there’s a risk that there is no EU position on some of the items.
From what I understand there are two camps. The first – let’s call them the prohibitionists – are led by the Commission, Belgium (who seem to want to hand the nicotine market to cocaine smugglers), France and Ireland. They want the EU to go to the next WHO meeting on Tobacco Control supporting resolutions that would endorse the banning of safer nicotine products.
The second – let’s call them the pragmatists – are led by Italy, Greece, Sweden and Czechia. Unsurprisingly, these countries have seen the benefits of safer nicotine products in recent years, and do not want to give up those gains. They won’t agree to language endorsing a ban.
One thing I keep hearing from yesterday’s meeting troubles me. Apparently, the Commission representative kept saying that the EU’s COP position shouldn’t be seen as pre-positioning for the revision of the EU Tobacco Products Directive, due next year.
The Commission wants to stress that the position of the EU (and by inference the outcome of COP) is not binding on Member States and won’t impact the revision of the TPD. Now, unlike all except one (I think) of the attachés in that room, pretty much all of the lobbyists covering this, and the entire press pack following it, I was actually there in 2013 the last time the TPD was reviewed. So I am – from a position of some knowledge – calling bullshit. It’s a trap, and the pragmatists must not fall for it.
You only have to read as far as page one of the explanatory memo of the Commission’s 2012 TPD proposal for proof. “It is…important to ensure a harmonised implementation of international obligations following from the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which is binding for the EU and all Member States”, the memo reads, “and a consistent approach to non-binding FCTC commitments, if there is a risk of diverging national transposition”.
It’s right there in black and white. Even non-binding commitments that the EU makes at COP, based on the Member States position being adopted now, will come right back around when the Commission proposes a nicotine pouch ban or a vape flavour ban as part of a beefed up Tobacco Directive.
“We must do this because the FCTC says so”, they will cry, regardless of whether or not commitments that are entered into are non-binding. It’s what the FCTC is for: a stick with which to beat recalcitrant children who dare to question the prohibitionist status quo.
Throughout the legislative process in 2013, representatives of the Commission and the prohibitionist NGO contingent repeated ad nauseam that new legislation was needed to ensure that the EU complies with the FCTC (which, as they love to point out, is legally binding on signatories).
I remember Martin Seychell – then Deputy Director General at DG SANTE – saying it to the European Parliament’s ENVI Committee. I remember Dominick Schnickels, the wily Head of Unit for Tobacco (who was way too smart to be reporting to Seychell if you ask me), saying it to me directly in a meeting I had with him towards the end of the process. I remember MEPs and NGOs repeating it as if it were Gospel. “The FCTC says so, and thus it must be so”.
So if – as the Commission wants – countries that support safer nicotine products acquiesce to a text that endorses, say, a ban on nicotine pouches, which is then adopted by the Conference of the Parties; then when the Commission proposes an EU-wide ban on nicotine pouches in the next TPD (as it surely will), it will take its FCTC shaped stick and use it to beat the Italians, Swedes, Greeks and Czechs into obedience. It is ignorant of history for anyone to claim otherwise. Especially the Commission.
The prohibitionists want to put pressure on the pragmatists to let them have their language endorsing potential bans. Brussels Signal, a site whose editorial line is generally sympathetic to the Hungarian government, where current Health Commissioner Várhelyi previously served, obtained the latest negotiating document and framed it as positive news for the progressives. Some in Brussels suspect that the timing of the leak may not have been entirely coincidental.
“The document, sent to delegates on October 27 and seen by Brussels Signal, represents a softening from an earlier, more aggressive draft that alarmed harm-reduction advocates and raised fears of sweeping bans or tax hikes on vaping and other nicotine alternatives” the story reads. The message for the pragmatists is clear: “look, you got what you wanted, now back off and let us have our ban language”.
We also had the document but chose not to publish it: it still endorses bans and so to us did not constitute news. But I can tell you, having seen the thing, that it does nothing whatsoever to “allay fears” of bans or tax hikes. That language is still very much there.
The progressives must stand firm and not agree to a single dot or comma that they don’t want forced down their throats when the TPD revision comes. Because that is precisely what will happen. It’s what the Framework Convention is designed for.
