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.