Question 18791 — commerce and crafts

Summary

Mr. François-Michel Lambert draws the attention of the Minister of Action and Public Accounts to the compliance of Decree No. 2019-177 with the WHO protocol on tobacco. The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed a protocol “to eliminate illicit trade in tobacco products” adopted in Seoul on November 12, 2012. Its article 8 requires in particular the parties to put in place a traceability system for tobacco products to put an end to the parallel tobacco trade. This protocol was signed by the EU on December 20, 2013 and ratified on June 24, 2016. It entered into international force on September 25, 2018 after it had been ratified by more than 40 countries. It is used today by more than 50 countries, including France. The community provisions and their implementing measures taken in France nevertheless do not seem compatible with the terms of the WHO protocol. THE provisions of this protocol, which entered into force on September 25, 2018, and which are binding on European law as well as on French law, provide, for obvious reasons, strict independence of the system with regard to tobacco professionals. However, it turns out that in European texts, only the issuance of the “unique identifier” (UID) is the responsibility of the States, while a very large number of elements of the system are left to the discretion of the States. discretion of tobacco producers and importers: marking of the code on tobacco packets, authentication of this marking, choice of companies responsible for storing data relating to tobacco. More seriously, of the five required security features, only one must be chosen from an “independent” supplier. In other words, it is the very people who are, essentially, at the origin of the illicit trade (tobacco producers) who responsibility for control intended to put an end to it is entrusted. By a decree dated March 8, 2019, the regulatory authorities intended to give the national printing company a monopoly on the printing of unique identifiers for the purposes of better traceability. However, this decree is limited only to setting the regime for printing identifiers without setting the terms of distribution and affixing of these on packets of tobacco at the risk of indirectly involving the tobacco industries. He therefore asks whether France intends to reestablish a traceability system in compliance with the requirements of the WHO protocol and consequently the compliance of the aforementioned decree with the protocol.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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