Dear moderator, dear invited participants

My thanks to the World Health Organisation and its co-organisers, the Norwegian Cancer Society and the McCabe Centre for Law & Cancer, for the invitation to speak to you today and for your efforts to keep this issue a central one for relevant policy makers and for the wider public.

Despite smoking bans and a lower take up of tobacco products by younger people, smoking remains the most significant cause of premature death in the EU, responsible for nearly 700,000 deaths every year.

And these figures do not take into account increasing concerns about young people’s exposure to toxic metals through vaping, a practice increasingly popular among adolescents with products deliberately marketed through flavours, names and packaging to make them look like harmless sweets and soft drinks.

Before coming here today, I Googled just two words, ‘vaping’ and ‘flavour’. The results included: Blueberry Sour Raspberry, Bubblegum, Donut, Ice Cream, Gummy Bear, and Marshmallow. You have to dig a lot deeper to find the nicotine and chemicals that constitute the actual core of the e-cigarette.

The role that the tobacco industry has played and continues to play in amplifying these public health concerns deserves continued and careful scrutiny.

And careful scrutiny is precisely what the office of the European Ombudsman does when it comes to examining how transparently and accountably the European Union institutions do their business. Such business has become increasingly important over the last decade with new powers granted to the EU following each successive crisis.

Regulations decided in Brussels and Strasbourg now affect the content of your smartphone, the quality of the air that we breathe, who gets to enter the EU, how well equipped our defence forces are, and other fundamental aspects of our daily lives and collective security.

The question of precisely who influences these vital regulations and decisions has been a major focus of my time in office. In theory, democracy demands that officials and institutions be held accountable for the decisions they make and part of that is to understand whether it is the public interest which has guided these decisions, or vested interests or even the internal interests of the administration or of individuals within the administration.

The answers to these questions are rarely black and white but it is essential that they be publicly debated and debated with relevant insight and facts. A well-functioning lobby register is one of the tools potentially capable of showing how private interests are wielding influence on EU policy.

I use the qualification ‘potentially’ because unlike lobby registers in the US, Ireland and elsewhere, the EU Transparency Register is a voluntary mechanism with limited sanctions in cases of abuse or misinformation.

Ensuring the accuracy and the information provided therefore requires a commitment to making the best use of whatever levers are available to ensure compliance. Earlier this year, my office made a finding of maladministration - one of the strongest negative judgements we can make - against the secretariat of the Transparency Register for failing to undertake a thorough investigation into an organisation lobbying against food-labelling. In our view, the failure promptly and properly to address obvious problems only encourages others to abuse the system with a consequent loss of public and official trust.

Without a clear picture from official sources of how regulations are being influenced, rumours, conspiracy theories and leaks will fill the gap. One example of how leaks  illuminate where official data does not, was the publication by media of Philip Morris International’s lobbying strategy around the 2014 EU’s Tobacco Products Directive (TPD),  hundreds of pages of internal documents.

There was much that was fascinating in the documents, but two important limitations of the EU register quickly became obvious.

Firstly, the main thrust of the lobbying strategy was directed not at the EU institutions - the European Commission, European Parliament etc. - but at EU national governments. At the time, few countries had adequate registration and disclosure requirements for lobbying and even today there are important EU countries such as Sweden and Spain that have no functioning registers.

Secondly, the documents revealed an intensive effort to engage with members of the European Parliament resulting in 233 MEPs meeting with Philip Morris representatives. All the meetings were held in private, as MEPs were not required to disclose such meetings. This remained the case until this year following parliament reforms prompted by the 2022 Qatargate scandal.

European Commissioners, their advisors and senior officials have been publishing these meetings since 2015, but many officials, including those charged with important draft legislation, are exempt from these requirements.

So, while it’s good that some gaps are being closed, as you can see it takes a very long time to do so and at times the reforms are prompted by scandals and not simply because it’s the obvious and right thing to do.

And these gaps are also routinely exploited by tobacco lobbyists and others leading  European citizens to struggle to understand the scale and impact of lobbying by private interests on legislation that aims to safeguard public health and other public goods.

Essentially, I want to point out that when basic rules about the transparency of the interactions of public officials are widely observed and strongly enforced, we can learn a lot about the role of lobbyists, including tobacco lobbyists, in shaping legislation and policy. But in the EU, we are still very far from that ideal.

Additionally, when stronger restrictions on the interactions between officials and some corporate sectors, such as those contained in the UN Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, are put in place, they have met with at times limited compliance and indeed resistance.

That has been our experience in assessing how the European Commission has implemented the WHO convention, through inquiries in 2016 and 2023.

This latest inquiry examined how the Commission was complying with WHO’s recommendation that there should be a whole-of-government approach to limiting and disclosing interactions with the tobacco industry.

We found that the Commission does not apply the convention’s recommendations outside of its health and customs departments yet we were able to document multiple meetings between tobacco industry representatives and officials across policy areas as diverse as transport, financial services, agriculture, European enlargement, climate change and trade.

This spread reflects the nature of modern multinational interests and modern policy-making, which cut across artificial institutional silos. We also found that many of these meetings were not only undisclosed, but also undocumented, in that official minutes were not taken or not recorded.

The risks of such an approach should be apparent. The tobacco industry’s profits and ability to sell potentially harmful products may be more adversely affected by regulations governing the EU’s internal market and international trade than health regulations more narrowly.

Therefore, where is the logic in allowing lobbyists free and undocumented access to officials of all ranks in those policy departments while facing tougher conditions in others? The Commission remains a collective, decisions made are the responsibility of all.  The reluctance of the Commission to remedy this illogicality has been puzzling, to say the least.

However, following the refusal to change after our 2016 report and finding of maladministration, we persevered. I can now report that our recent investigation did prompt a reflection by the Commission’s services.

 A first risk assessment found that six additional policy departments are at risk of lobbying from the industry and four of them indicated their willingness to apply further transparency measures, if considered necessary. My office will be following further progress and related decision-making very closely.

The very slow progress on this issue comes, arguably, from the deep-seated concerns of lobbyists and officials alike. For both, the worry is the lobbying restrictions proposed by the WHO convention represent just the beginning of a move to curtail lobbying more widely. Measures designed to limit tobacco industry access could become the norm across many other sectors.

Officials in turn fear an unmanageable bureaucratic burden that will limit their discretion and bring greater scrutiny on what they consider to be the normal business of regulation.

These fears may or may not be real. What I would suggest is that their potentially disruptive application is something that deserves serious consideration. The fundamental insight of the convention is that when public policy making involves matters of high public interest, the interactions between the regulated and regulator should be limited to what is strictly necessary. 

This is particularly true in relation to the climate emergency and the future of our planet? Should interactions with the fossil fuels industry be regarded in the same way as those of the tobacco industry? What about car manufacturers, airlines and agribusiness? But these are highly complex matters, and arguably, much more complex than those of tobacco industry.  Their complexity also makes our capacity to see how climate policies are being influenced much more difficult.  But fundamentally, we owe it to our children and future generations not to simply carry on with business as usual.

I cannot conclude without referencing this week’s announcement by the European Commission calling on member states to ban the smoking of tobacco products and of e cigarettes outdoors. This is just at the proposal stage and it will be very interesting to see how it progresses. No doubt the tobacco industry will attempt to influence outcomes in the member states and it will therefore provide an opportunity to see how much influence its lobbyists can exert.

My thanks for your attention and I look forward to your questions and the ensuing discussion.