Dublin South West Sinn F\u00e9in TD, Se\u00e1n Crowe, has welcomed the European Court of Justice (ECJ) judgements on plain packaging for tobacco products.<\/p>\n
Crowe said that the decision has the potential to have huge positive and far reaching health implications, but he also said that the ISDS mechanism currently being discussed in the TTIP negotiations between the European Union and the USA would potentially negate and undermine decisions like this in the very near future.<\/p>\n
Deputy Se\u00e1n Crowe said:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know that 1 in every 2 people who take up cigarettes die from smoking related illnesses and an\u00a0\u00a0 estimated 5,870 people die from smoking related illnesses in Ireland every year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis unacceptable death toll, combined with other cardiovascular and pulmonary medical conditions, means that as a society we need to do everything in our power to discourage new people from getting addicted to tobacco products and to prevent the proliferation and accessibility of these products.<\/p>\n
\u201cSinn F\u00e9in wholeheartedly supported the legislation that would introduce plain packaging on tobacco products when it was being debated in the D\u00e1il and Seanad.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat legislation was aggressively challenged by the tobacco industry in the Courts.<\/p>\n
\u201cI particularly welcome the judgements of the ECJ that were released this week, which uphold that the plain packaging Directive provides a legal basis for Ireland and other countries to introduce standardised packaging of tobacco products.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe EU and USA are currently in negotiations around a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) that could potentially undermine and negate positive decisions like this.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe so called ISDS mechanism, which is being negotiated as part of TTIP, would allow massive multinational corporations to circumvent local and national court decisions and to sue Governments in a secretive international court.<\/p>\n
\u201cDecisions like these ones taken by the ECJ would be superseded by decisions made in an unaccountable tribunal. This would undermine initiatives like plain packaging on tobacco products and would ultimately undermine the democratic decision making of Governments.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
ENDS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dublin South West Sinn F\u00e9in TD, Se\u00e1n Crowe, has welcomed the European Court of Justice (ECJ) judgements on plain packaging for tobacco products. Crowe said that the decision has the potential to have huge positive and far reaching health implications, but he also said that the ISDS mechanism currently being discussed in the TTIP negotiations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225,44,227,226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ecj","category-health","category-plain-packaging","category-tobacco"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2555,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2554\/revisions\/2555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/seancrowe.ie\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}