NGOs unite for ENSP conference at decisive moment in Europe’s anti-tobacco crusade

NGOs from across the continent heard from economists, including OECD tax experts, university researchers, and public health advocates, whose presentations provided empirical evidence of how manipulated tobacco economics routinely presents an illusion of prosperity while concealing the industry’s true societal burden. Discussions converged around the urgent need for stronger anti-tobacco and nicotine addiction measures.

Indeed, the conference’s experts asserted that despite the tobacco industry’s marketing of new tobacco products like vapes and heated tobacco as safer alternatives, these devices serve as nicotine dependency gateways. Furthermore, participants emphasized the need to reverse a decade of tobacco lobby-influenced EU inaction by strengthening fiscal and anti-illicit trade measures in line with the WHO FCTC and its Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco Products – a pivotal issue as Europe hits a decisive tobacco crossroads.

Europe on the tobacco precipice

With 700,000 tobacco-related deaths recorded annually across the continent and Europe now leading the world in smoking rates at nearly 25%, as highlighted in a new WHO report, the ENSP conference could not have been timelier.

The ENSP, under the helm of Secretary General Cornel Radu-Loghin, has been leading the charge against this concerning tobacco trend. Coordinating and advocating for tobacco control policies through a pan-European coalition of more than 600 member-organisations, the ENSP’s effort has become particularly vital as Big Tobacco-aligned countries increasingly reveal their true colours.

With its plans to tighten the fiscal screws on both conventional and emerging tobacco products through its Tobacco Excise Tax Directive (TED) review and proposed Tobacco Excise Duty Own Resource (TEDOR), the European Commission has elicited strong opposition from member-states such as Italy, Romania, and Bulgaria. Meanwhile, France, Spain and Ireland remain among the most vocal supporters of higher excise duties, with Ireland’s position – driven by health minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill – particularly consequential given its EU Council Presidency starting in July 2026.

This intra-EU divide is hardly coincidental: several of the dissenting governments have recently welcomed massive Big Tobacco investments in new manufacturing facilities. Doubling down in late October, Rome parroted the tobacco industry’s well-worn, and long-discredited, claim that steeper EU tobacco taxes will fuel illicit trade.

Belgrade Declaration’s anti-tobacco roadmap

Consequently, the ENSP conference’s pairing of NGOs like the Bulgarian Smoke-Free Coalition and Italy’s Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research with Spain’s Nofumadores Association and France’s Alliance Against Tobacco (ACT) – a key contributor, alongside the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) and the University of Bath, to the European Parliament’s recent White Paper on tobacco control – was particularly significant. This civil society fostering of pan-European unity where the political sphere has failed increases the legitimacy of the Belgrade Declaration on Tobacco Taxation and Competitiveness, adopted at the event’s close and propelled by the momentum of the newly-established NGO Impact Unfiltered.

Crucially, the Declaration reaffirms that effective tobacco taxation remains one of Europe’s most powerful, evidence-based tools to protect public health while bolstering economic resilience. What’s more, it underlines how modernised excise policies can strengthen competitiveness, productivity and fiscal stability, while simultaneously reducing the prevalence of cancer, cardiovascular, and respiratory diseases. The Declaration’s approach was notably backed by conference participant Vital Strategies, a New York-based, Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded public health organisation.

Concretely, the Declaration’s signatories call for ambitious, harmonised taxation across all nicotine products – a promising approach given the WHO’s new finding of “alarming” youth vaping levels – as well as stronger illicit trade controls. The Declaration also urges governments to reinvest excise revenues in anti-tobacco public health programmes and shield policymaking from tobacco industry interference. This call is particularly ambitious and relevant given its timing ahead of the WHO FCTC Conference of the Parties (COP11) and Meeting of the Parties (MOP4) slated for 17-22 November in Geneva – both of which are being actively targeted by Big Tobacco lobbyists.

Together, the Declaration’s measures represent a united European commitment to fiscal fairness, health equity, and a tobacco-free future, yet delivering will require overcoming entrenched tobacco industry influence.

Spotlighting Big Tobacco’s policy interference

As highlighted at the conference, Europe’s growing illicit trade is at the heart of the continent’s tobacco problems. Participants notably targeted the shortcomings of the EU’s track-and-trace system, which is widely viewed as non-compliant with the WHO Protocol due to the continued indirect influence of tobacco industry interests. While the EU system may offer insights into consumption patterns, ENSP contributors highlighted this data’s failure to support law enforcement – particularly given the unreliability of figures provided by Big Tobacco-linked entities.

The question of industry interference loomed large throughout the conference, with not even host country Serbia evading scrutiny. As in Italy, participants noted that Serbian authorities appeared overly close to tobacco producers given the local presence of tobacco production facilities. Yet the economic reality is stark: despite the jobs created, the overall societal cost remains negative. The direct and indirect economic burden of tobacco consumption in Serbia is estimated at nearly 5% of GDP – a staggering figure that overshadows any fiscal contribution from the sector.

Given that the single most effective lever to reduce tobacco consumption is tax-driven price hikes, the tobacco industry undermines them by fueling parallel trade that exploits wide intra-EU tax gaps. Unsurprisingly, Big Tobacco invests heavily in compromising anti-illicit trade mechanisms, using allied firms including Dentsu, Inexto, Worldline and others integrated into the EU system.

In this regard, the EU system has largely failed. With data storage providers, anti-tampering device suppliers and even system auditors connected to the tobacco industry, Europe has evolved little since the flawed arrangements of the early 2000s, when major tobacco companies signed “co-operation agreements” involving them in the authentication process of the very products they had once been accused of smuggling.

Moreover, an EU member-state health official at the conference defended the system as a useful tool for mapping consumption trends, yet conceded that no data had shown it to be effective in curbing illicit trade. It could not be disputed that such parallel trade has, in reality, continued to be prevalent, seriously undermining tobacco control efforts and highlighting the EU system’s ineffectiveness, beyond its non-compliance with the WHO Protocol.

Confronting Brussels’ ‘Trumpian’ turn

Encouragingly, certain actors remain determined to pursue genuine solutions. In late October, the WHO FCTC notably commended the Belgrade Declaration, urging Europe’s tobacco control NGOs to contribute to the European Commission’s TED consultation before October 31 to help implement a modernised, WHO-compliant tobacco control regime.

Yet, civil society now has one hand tied behind its back, with the Commission’s ‘Trumpian’ termination of operational grants for tobacco control NGOs an incomprehensible gift to Big Tobacco. This decision to strip public health organisations of the modest funding they depend on has sparked a formal complaint by health groups currently under review by the European Ombudsman.

As the EU prepares ambitious revisions to the TED and Tobacco Products Directive (TPD), funding for the very organisations that have historically supported these reforms is being withdrawn, raising a fundamental question about the Commission’s priorities. The choice is simple: does Brussels intend to protect the interests of foreign corporations profiting from products causing 700,000 annual European deaths, or of those who have long fought to safeguard citizens’ wellbeing?

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