Vital Strategies hails India, Europe courts for upholding graphic warnings on tobacco

Vital Strategies has hailed the India and Europe courts for upholding key tobacco control policies against legal challenges from the tobacco industry and said this was a victory for health.

In a statement, the global public health experts, formerly World Lung Foundation, on Wednesday said those verdicts would give the other countries some “comfort” in facing “insidious threats” of legal action from the tobacco industries.

India’s Supreme Court ruled in favour of the implementation and enforcement of graphic warnings covering 85 percent of tobacco packaging.

The European Court of Justice rebutted three legal challenges to the Tobacco Products Directive, which includes the implementation of large graphic warnings on tobacco packs.

President and Chief Executive Officer of Vital Strategies José Luis Castro commented that the fact that both cases support the implementation of large graphic health warnings on tobacco packs is “a critical development”.

“It shows that governments have the legal right to use tobacco packaging to warn people about tobacco’s harms with the objective of reducing tobacco use – which brings such a high social, health and economic burden.

“It also confirms that consumers have the right to know about the real harms of tobacco so they can make properly informed choices – not choices driven by decades of pervasive and misleading tobacco industry marketing,” he said.

“We congratulate the Government of India and European nations on the development and successful legal defence of these tobacco control policies”.

Bangladesh has introduced pictorial health warnings, but the government has bowed down to the industry’s pressure and allowed printing graphic images in the lower half of the packets, instead of the upper part where it is more visible.

Anti-tobacco campaigners, however, said even then the law was being flouted widely, and they hardly found tobacco packs with graphic warnings in the market.