Alliance for tobacco advertising ban demands implementation

Boys having a smoke at a traditional Swiss cattle show KEYSTONE

Two years to the day after Swiss voters and cantons approved an initiative to ban tobacco advertising, the authors of the petition are concerned about its implementation.

Parliament is about to violate the constitution, they say. The committee hopes that the councillors will give in.

In the vote in February 2022, voters and cantons decided that tobacco advertising, advertising for e-cigarettes and other nicotine products must not reach children and young people. However, the Senate and the responsible House of Representatives committee do not want to implement the initiative text word for word and want to allow exceptions, for example for the sponsorship of music festivals.

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Before the bill is debated again in parliament in the spring session, the organisation behind the “Children and young people without tobacco advertising” initiative is putting pressure on it.

“The current form of legislation does not correspond to what the people and the cantons have decided,” said former Senator Hans Stöckli on Tuesday. That is not right, he said. “Parliament must not make unconstitutional decisions.”

According to law professor Thomas Gächter, father of the initiative text, parliament wants to enshrine an extremely narrow definition of advertising in the revised Tobacco Products Act. The constitutional article is clear: any advertising aimed at young people that could tempt them to consume tobacco should be banned.

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The fact that parliament wants to remove the ban on sales promotion and sponsorship from the bill is a “very problematic step”, he said. Gächter referred to a recently published report by the justice ministry, according to which parliament’s previous decisions were not in line with the constitution. Overall, this is a “clear dilution of the constitutional text”, Gächter said.

The initiative committee now plans to await the House of Representatives’ decisions on the Tobacco Products Act. “If parliament does not decide in our favour, we will make our further plans,” Stöckli said.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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