The European Commission’s attempt to restrict the sale of flavoured heated tobacco products will be referred to the European Court of Justice by Ireland’s Supreme Court. PJ Carroll & Company and Nicoventures Trading, two companies that market and sell heated tobacco in Ireland, filed the lawsuit. They challenged the Irish State over the adoption of an EU directive, arguing that the EC had exceeded the power conferred on it by tobacco legislation passed by EU legislative bodies, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament.
It is now certain that the Dublin court will refer the case to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and lawyers on both sides are called upon to agree on the issues to be decided by the Court. These are issues that the European Commission will also have to address in order to justify its decision to extend the scope of its delegated power to include products that were once exempt from regulation.
According to Judge Cian Ferriter’s ruling, there are strong arguments for invalidating the European Commission’s directive that would have resulted in a complete ban on flavoured heated tobacco, including glo, the product at the heart of the legal battle.
In their lawsuit, the companies argued that the European Commission made invalid a political choice to ban it. This argument, according to the judge, meant that the EC had effectively banned “a category of tobacco products that was new to the market, which did not exist at the time of the adoption of the Tobacco Products Directive in 2014 and which had not been subject to separate policy and health assessments”.
Judge Ferriter ruled that “it is at least questionable that this concerned a political choice that was open only to the EU legislator and not to the European Commission”. The case will therefore be referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union. In addition, it asks the Luxembourg court to rule on the EC’s methodology, since it acted in view of increased sales of heated tobacco, but did not take into account the fact that heated tobacco sticks contain less tobacco than cigarettes.
Source : TobaccoAsia.com
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