Month: October 2025

FCTC bureaucrats have decided national delegations just get in the way

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Who needs elected governments anyway?

Before our next foray into the intentions of the FCTC Secretariat at the upcoming COP11 conference to be held in Geneva in November, it is worth just reiterating what the acronym COP actually means. To do this, COPWatch directs you to one of our first explainer articles from four years ago.

Note the “decision makers are national governments” part. This is because COP stands for “Conference of the Parties” which means the (unelected) administrators of the FCTC treaty should be presenting objective options and then sitting back and letting the Parties (representatives of elected national governments) decide what happens next. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to COP11 agenda item 4.4 concerning “Regulation of contents and disclosure of tobacco products” (Articles 9 & 10), the FCTC Secretariat seems to have forgotten that fundamental principle of the treaty.

Up until 2018, an open working group deliberated on product content and emissions testing using up-to-date science, until the FCTC authorities suspended it. WHO surveys in 2020 and 2021 found that most Parties wanted the group reinstated, not replaced by a closed “expert group” handpicked by the Secretariat. Despite this clear majority on two separate occasions, the WHO claimed there was “little support” for reactivation and instead sided with the minority by recommending its own controlled expert panel.

Parties mandated a working group more than 15 years ago, but the Secretariat convinced everyone that an expert group would make more progress. Yet since they did so, there has been no progress whatsoever.

At COP10, this led to a stalemate when articles 9 & 10 were discussed. The subject was debated to such an extent that other agenda items had to be shunted to a different committee due to time constraints. After a full six days of deadlock, no decision could be made and the subject had to be adjourned to COP11. 

The FCTC Secretariat would surely have to finally bend to the will of the Parties and reinstall a working group, wouldn’t it? Not a bit of it. Instead, the FCTC Bureau has recommended deferring the establishment of either an expert group or a working group. They’d rather just handle the discussion on their own. 

Article 5.4 of the treaty dictates that Parties “shall cooperate in the formulation of proposed measures, procedures and guidelines for the implementation of the Convention” but that seems to now have been abandoned.

Who needs the Parties to make decisions anyway? They just get in the way of what the FCTC administrators want to do. 

So, the FCTC lanyard class have now decided to redirect financial resources to what they call “capacity building” for the implementation of Articles 9 and 10. This involves secret discussions with carefully selected entities (most likely compliant NGOs) to achieve the Secretariat’s goals of banning flavours, implementing plain packaging of all nicotine products, and prohibiting anything that might hint that some nicotine products are less harmful than smoking. 

After all, those Parties might (as they did at COP10) disagree with what the FCTC authorities wish to do, and that just isn’t acceptable. 

Perhaps the upcoming COP should more accurately be termed the “Conference of the Bureaucrats” because if national governments allow themselves to be cut out of the conversation so blatantly, they may as well not bother even turning up in future.

The expert group with little expertise

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How your taxes fund jobs for the WHO’s chums

Our attention was drawn to a rather unusual expert group convened to provide recommendations for COP agenda item 4.3 concerning “Protection of the environment and the health of persons.” 

We were eager to learn more about the personnel involved in this expert group. They are named in the supplementary “Regulatory options” report which is located in the Supplementary documents area on the COP11 website. We found that 25 individuals were involved in producing the document, either as authors, contributors or external reviewers.

Those producing such a comprehensive report on environmental matters for a global health authority such as the WHO must surely be a who’s who of prominent environmental researchers. A veritable stellar list of big name heavy-hitters.

It was disappointing, then, to discover that out of the 25 names, only two had ever published a research paper on environmental matters. Out of the three research items they have produced between them, one focused on “Neanderthal environments in Portugal” and another was a master’s thesis on “exposure to benzene in industrial cities.”

Not one of the eight external reviewers has any environmental science credentials whatsoever, nor have eight of the authors and contributors. And none are listed as specialists in ecotoxicology, waste-management engineering, life-cycle assessment, marine pollution, or environmental chemistry. The disciplines normally required for the report’s subject matter.

In fact, the expert group is dominated by tobacco-control and legal advocates, not environmental scientists, so it is a misnomer to call it an “expert” group at all. 

But perhaps it doesn’t matter. Far from being a serious academic attempt to align tobacco control with the environmental movement, the report just reverts to traditional tobacco control rhetoric about prohibitive measures such as banning cigarette filters and disposable vapes, outdoor smoking bans, and reducing the number of shops selling tobacco and nicotine products. 

Regular readers will know that expert group members are selected by the Convention Secretariat rather than chosen by national governments, so mostly comprise NGO activists sympathetic to the Secretariat’s ideology (Working groups, by contrast, are much more democratic as they are selected by national governments – funnily enough, there appear to be no current working groups at FCTC COP).

It is no surprise, therefore, that no one in this group is talking about scientific evidence, the incidence of trade-offs, or considering unintended outcomes, and there’s certainly no effort to connect their ideas to any coherent environmental or waste policy.

It seems that if you are “in” with the WHO, you are eligible for “jobs for the boys” in any expert group, no matter how non-existent your policy expertise actually is.