In 2023, an informal EU parliamentary working group on tobacco products, led by French MEPs Anne-Sophie Pelletier, Pierre Larrouturou and the late Michèle Rivasi, organised a number of roundtables to discuss how the permeability of some European Commission departments to tobacco industry lobbying was causing delays in the revision of two important regulations (see TSTN July 2023).

In April, the Informal European Parliamentary Working Group for preparing the revision of the EU Tobacco Products Directive (IPWG TPD) held a workshop with civil society organisations, to address the lobbying efforts and ‘soft power’ of the tobacco industry to influence EU policies.

The Smoke Free Partnership, a European coalition of NGOs working to mobilise governments to make tobacco control a political priority, has raised concerns about the track and trace provisions of the EU Tobacco Products Directive.

The International Tax Stamp Association (ITSA) is calling for improvements to a directive that controls the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco products in the European Union.

The European Union represents the world’s first attempt at implementation of wide-scale, multi-country tobacco traceability and the largest iteration of the FCTC Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products (the Protocol) in action. The implications in relation to one of the world’s largest tobacco market’s interpretation and implementation of the Protocol, as well as the benefits that traceability can provide in terms of combatting illicit trade, has the significant potential to influence tobacco traceability the world over.

An extensive lobbying effort by the tobacco industry has been revealed in a paper by researchers at the University of Bath (UK), published in October in Tobacco Control.