New EU rules that ban menthol cigarettes and impose standard packaging on tobacco will be brought in over the next 12 months after three separate legal challenges were dismissed by the European Court of Justice.
The ECJ ruled that the EU Tobacco Products Directive was valid yesterday, deciding that the tobacco industry’s challenge to the new rules, which had held up its introduction for two years, were without foundation.
The directive, which comes in on May 20 but gives the industry a year’s grace to sell existing stock, requires health warnings to cover 65 per cent of the front and back of a cigarette packet and bans descriptors such as “lite”, “natural” and “organic”.
It also bans packets of ten cigarettes, imposing a minimum of 20, while hand-rolling tobacco can no longer be sold in packets of less than 30 grams.
Flavoured cigarettes, including menthol, fruits and chocolate will be prohibited on the grounds that they draw in younger smokers by making them taste more pleasant. Poland wanted less restrictive measures, including an age limit on menthol products.
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The ECJ found that the measures in the directive were “proportionate” and did not infringe European principles of “subsidiarity”, which determine whether such decisions should be taken on a national basis rather than by the EU.
The directive, which includes tighter regulation of electronic cigarettes, is part of an attempt by the EU to reduce the number of smokers across its member states by 2.4 million. In particular, the European Commission had sought to deter young people from experimenting with tobacco.
The new rules are separate from individual moves by the UK, France and Ireland to introduce plain packaging. In Britain, the move is being challenged by Big Tobacco in the High Court.
Manufacturers were dismayed by the ruling, with British American Tobacco calling it ��a clear example of the EU overstepping the limits of its authority”.
Alison Cooper, the chief executive of Imperial Brands, the owner of Davidoff and Gauloises, estimated the cost of implementing the directive and the UK’s plain packaging rules to be in “the low tens of millions”.
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Deborah Arnott, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, the charity, said that the decision was “welcome if not surprising”.