From Monday 17^th till Saturday 22^nd of November, Smoke Free Partnership participated in the 11^th Conference of Parties (COP11) to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) taking place in Geneva.

This press release presents highlights from SFP’s participation in COP11. Smoke Free Partnership’s perspective on the formal decisions made at COP11 can be found in a separate press release in collaboration with the Comité national contre le tabagisme (CNCT) and Contre-feu.

The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and its Conference of the Parties

The WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control is an international, legally binding treaty on tobacco control. The treaty currently has 183 ‘parties’ – mostly countries – that support it, among them all 27 EU member states and the European Union itself. The Conference of the Parties is a two-yearly diplomatic event at which the parties to the convention discuss progress made in the implementation of the FCTC and make collective decisions to advance tobacco control globally.

The effective implementation of the FCTC is the mission of Smoke Free Partnership. SFP was therefore pleased it could again participate in COP11 as an official non-governmental observer recognised by the COP11 . Specifically, SFP director Erin Roman functioned as the European Regional Coordinator for the Global Alliance for Tobacco Control (GATC).

On the first day of the convention, November 17, Erin stood on behalf of the tobacco control movement in Europe at the unveiling of the Death Clock. The Death Clock keeps a running tally of how many people have died from tobacco-related diseases since 28 October 1999. That’s the date of the first meeting of the working group on the future World health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). Erin reaffirmed SFP’s commitment to preventing further loss of life and ending this tragic cycle.

SFP’s side event - Sweden: Setting It Straight

On November 18, SFP organised an important side event that highlighted the tobacco industry’s exploitation of Sweden’s declining smoking rates to promote nicotine pouches and snus as tools for ‘harm reduction’.

The tobacco industry claims Sweden’s success as evidence for the benefits of smoke-free nicotine products. The reality, according to Swedish public health experts and advocates, is quite different. The decline in smoking in Sweden is the result of strong, evidence-based tobacco control policies, such as advertising bans, high tobacco taxes, and smoke-free laws, rather than the increased use of nicotine products.

Some other key insights from the session include:

• The tobacco industry uses Sweden’s success in reducing smoking to promote nicotine products as a quitting tool. In reality, these products are marketed primarily to young people, not current smokers. The usage of these products is skyrocketing among youth.
• The Swedish story is an example of the ‘geographic exemplar’ stories used by the Tobacco industry. The tobacco industry has used similar tactics when misrepresenting experiences of Japan with HTPs , the UK with e-cigarettes, and most recently New Zealand.
• The Swedish experience is not exclusive to Sweden: Norwegian youth use more oral nicotine products and smoke more than their Swedish peers, while there is no evidence that adult smokers quit smoking thanks to snus.
• Nicotine pouches were already introduced in Kenya before they were introduced in many non-Nordic European countries. Although Kenyan CSOs were originally successful in suspending sales of these products, recently they have re-appeared under a new brand name.
• Various countries like France, the Netherlands and Denmark have taken swift steps to regulate oral nicotine products. In Denmark, measures include limits to nicotine content, bans on advertising, limits to flavours and higher taxation. In France and the Netherlands, governments successfully banned oral nicotine products altogether.

The side event reminded attendees that the rising use of nicotine pouches among young people in Sweden is a warning sign, not a success story.

European Champions and High-level support for Tobacco Control

Despite extensive coordination and political negotiations, the EU Member States failed to reach a unified and ambitious position prior to COP11. During COP11 itself several Member States played a crucial role in maintaining unity and resisting efforts to weaken or dilute key provisions on behalf of the EU.

One public sign of European support for strong tobacco control came from Belgian health minister Frank Vandenbroucke. During a ministerial roundtable on ‘preventing a new wave of youth addiction’, he articulated both a moral and legal obligation to protect children, citing FCTC Article 5.2b, which mandates fighting nicotine addiction. WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus emphasised emphasized that novel nicotine products are producing harm rather than reducing harm.

On that same panel, Sandra Gallina, Director-General of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health & Food Safety, expressed the need to move the regulatory focus in tobacco control from consumer safety to protecting the young. She recognised that flavours encourage initiation among non-smokers and make electronic products a gateway to nicotine addiction.

Big Tobacco B*llshit bingo

The largest part of COP11 consisted of deliberations between parties to the FCTC to adopt decisions on topics like forward-looking tobacco control measures, the environmental harms caused by tobacco products and industry liability. During these deliberations, a variety of countries could be heard echoing misinformation spread by the tobacco industry.

The tobacco industry relies on addiction and on narratives that distract, delay and confuse. To identify this misinformation and spread counter-arguments, fellows from the School for Moral Ambition devised a website identifying the most-heard to bacco-industry arguments. It offers a simple, interactive tool that shows how these arguments aren’t grounded in solid evidence and what the majority of experts actually think about these topics.