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E-cigarettes: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater
This week, US President Donald Trump announced a crackdown on flavoured vaping products such as e-cigarettes, in the light of recent lung conditions that the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have referred to as ‘Vaping-Associated Lung Injury‘. Symptoms include shortness of breath, chest pains, trouble doing daily activities, coughing, fatigue, weight loss, fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, but not all patients experienced all those symptoms. The mechanism of infection remains unclear, but nearly all of the cases involved patients who used THC [the cannabis component responsible for the ‘high’ effect] in their vaping pens.
As such, the evidence we have appears to point to illicit vapes rather than standard, legal e-cigarettes. Some of them contain a thickening agent used to mislead consumers, vitamin E acetate, which has the potential to be harmful to the lungs. Banning perfectly legitimate flavoured vaping liquids will not resolve issues related to black-market products. On the contrary, it is a knee-jerk response designed to seem proactive.
That runs a serious risk of doing far more damage to public health in the long run. E-cigarettes have the potential to reduce tobacco-related harms. Ordinary cigarettes produce carcinogenic by-products when they burn, but e-cigarettes heat up a liquid containing nicotine to produce an aerosol. It is too early to say what long-term effects they have. They are not risk free, but they are clearly less risky than traditional cigarettes.
It is, therefore, beneficial for public health if smokers turn to vaping, even if they initially continue to use cigarettes in a gradual changeover. Flavours have a role in helping adults make that change. In a study of those using e-cigarettes to reduce or quit smoking, early adopters stated that the first-generation devices they used were less appealing and noted that the flavours gave e-cigarettes an advantage over nicotine patches, gums and sprays.
Harm reduction principles involve accepting that drug use is part of our world. Their main goal is risk mitigation, as opposed to eliminating drug usage. Applied to e-cigarettes, this means valuing individual wellbeing over ending nicotine addiction. This is how the United Kingdom has chosen to respond to the rise of vaping: by recognising its public health potential.
The Nanny State Index, produced by the EPICENTER think tank network, includes an indicator on e-cigarette regulation at EU level. It is composed of four elements: product bans, taxation, advertising, and vaping bans. The EU’s Tobacco Products Directive has set out some legal requirements surrounding tank sizes, nicotine concentration, purity, packaging, cross-border advertising bans and monitoring and reporting requirements. This means that all Member States score a certain number of points on product regulation and advertising. However, there is substantial disparity between the Member States.
The UK, having chosen a harm reduction strategy, is the least restrictive country in the index. The worst offender is Hungary, which has gone to the opposite extreme: banning advertising, cross-border sales, and including vaping in public smoking bans unless medically prescribed (which is unlikely.) It also bans all e-cigarette flavours other than tobacco.
Proponents of such flavour bans suggest they are designed to prevent a ‘gateway’ effect, in which children and non-smokers take up vaping. The WHO suggested its members should ban fruit, candy, and alcohol flavours until it was proven they were not attractive to minors. Not only does this fail to take into account the potential opportunity cost of failing to incentivise adult smokers to switch, it is also not borne out by the few studies that have been done.
The UK, having the most liberal rules on e-cigarettes in the Nanny State Index, can be used as a case study. Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) carried out a survey in 2019, which allowed for comparison between the period before and after UK and EU regulations were introduced. They showed that the vast majority of 11-18 year olds either had not tried or did not know about e-cigarettes. Among those who had never smoked, 93.8% had never tried or were not aware of e-cigarettes. Only 0.1% of them vaped more than once a week.
In line with harm reduction principles, regular use was limited to current or ex-smokers. The flavours were a more important factor in trying vaping for current or ex-smokers than for never smokers, and all those groups most commonly tried them to find out what they were like. Of particular note was that this survey included 18 year olds because otherwise there would have been insufficient data for analysis – 90.4% of 11-15 year old respondents had never used or were unaware of e-cigarettes and 1.1% of them used e-cigarettes more than weekly. Other ASH data showed that in 2016, 2.7% of 11-15 year olds smoked more than one cigarette a week.
It is clear, therefore, that the UK’s openness to e-cigarettes has not led to widespread use by children and teenagers. On the contrary, usage numbers seem to align with the theory that it is mostly smokers who take up vaping.
Overall, e-cigarettes have the potential to revolutionise public health across Europe, if the regulatory environment allows for it. Beyond the basic, sensible measures on purity, monitoring, and consumer information that have already been taken, there is no need for additional knee-jerk regulation or taxation at Member State or EU level. To do so would run the risk of pushing smokers back to traditional cigarettes, which are known killers. Where the EU and its members can help is through conducting additional research to debunk myths, learn more about health impacts to help individuals make informed choices, and to develop evidence-based smoking cessation programmes involving e-cigarettes. The European Commission has requested a scientific opinion on these issues, and it should use that research to encourage its members to open themselves up to the full potential of this technological innovation.
This Is New Africa: EU-Africa relations after Cotonou
Source: PixabayBefore we start talking about Africa, trade, and development, take a few minutes to go and take this quiz. A quick highlight, if you don’t have the time: in the last 20 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has halved.
How did you do? Most people do not do very well. They actually do worse than a computer randomly selecting the answers would (do). That is because us humans come with pre-existing biases, from charity appeals and songs and endless images of people in extreme poverty worldwide. A lot of people assume that extreme poverty is getting worse, when the opposite is happening.
The Africa that the EU is negotiating its future relationship with is not the Africa of Live Aid (which was incredibly patronising even in 1984, and bears no resemblance to the modern-day continent.) It has exceptional growth potential, as well as a young population, and seeks to enact the right policies to ensure that growth leads to jobs for those young people. That’s where the EU-Africa relationship comes in. The renewal of their partnership will provide an opportunity to build a true partnership of equals: one that should aim to consign misconceptions and stereotyping to the past.
Indeed, when the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) – EU Partnership Agreement (more commonly known as ‘Cotonou‘) was signed in 2000, the African Union (AU) was still known as the Organisation of African Unity. Just as Africa’s governance has changed, so has Europe’s, and, naturally, Cotonou has evolved to take into account changes over the last 20 years.
The rise of the AU is something that will specifically have to be considered. The ACP group was developed by its Member States for development and negotiation purposes, primarily with the EU. The pressing question today is whether continuing with centralised negotiations at the ACP-EU level would sideline Africa’s own regional and continental institutions – as well as North African countries, which are in the AU but not the ACP as they fall under the EU Neighbourhood Policy. In turn, centralised negotiations risk reducing regional engagement with and interest in African-EU affairs. The EU must make sure that both the AU and regional groups are treated as important, relevant actors (not just in Africa, but in the Caribbean and Pacific) and that their knowledge and expertise is recognised and valued in the negotiations.
Trade is just one of the areas where African regions are especially relevant. The EU, being a trade power, has used its Generalised Scheme of Preferences classifications as well as trade deals to ensure that the vast majority of African countries benefit from reduced or entirely eliminated tariffs. The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the EU cover different regional groups within the ACP. However, there was little additional benefit to African countries from negotiating these deals where they already had almost complete access to the Single Market. A side-effect of these regional deals has been that groups of African countries have signed up to different trade terms and commitments. As the AU recently ratified the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTA), it is attempting to move towards a single African market for goods and services, which is made more complex by those divergent trade practices.
Think back to the quiz you just did. Poverty worldwide has dropped substantially over the last few decades. One of the reasons for this drop is trade liberalisation. To eradicate persistent extreme poverty, especially in Africa, the World Bank has called on the international community to reduce trade costs, improve the trade environment, tackle specific barriers facing remote, small traders and women, and mitigate the risks that the poor face
The Center for Global Development‘s recommendations to the EU identified an issue with EU rules of origin. Countries that manufacture products using components sourced from other African countries find it difficult to prove they have sufficient domestic content to access reduced tariffs or provisions of a trade agreement, which disincentivises regional value chains. The CGD also maintains that agricultural subsidies undermine development and have little benefit for the environment. A study for the European Parliament Development Committee found that, under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), some targeted support for particular agricultural products distorted markets and there was a lack of coherence between agriculture and climate goals. The CAP goes to the heart of internal EU controversies. In a negotiation between equal partners in which one side is negatively affected by subsidies, however, the two partners will have to be bold enough to tackle it head-on.
Migration is a similarly controversial issue which the two partners will not be able to duck. Most Africans who want to move wish to do so within Africa, although 27% still wish to move to Europe. As countries get richer, migration increases, until they reach the mid-range of upper middle-income status. Out of 54 African countries, 9 currently have World Bank upper-middle income status or above and 23 have lower-middle income status. The potential for increased migration, therefore, is real. African countries have particular security concerns about the risk of youth unemployment: migration both helps mitigate the issue and allows the country of origin to benefit from remittances.
What is in it for the EU? To start with, although limiting migration is often cast as a security measure, if conflicts are exacerbated by unemployment the EU can expect additional migration flows. Europe suffers from demographic pressures that are the opposite to Africa’s: its population is aging. Legal migration pathways have the potential to benefit both sides, and the Commission cannot sustainably continue with business as usual. Pressure from Africa may be useful in forcing it to act. The expansion of Global Skills Partnerships (GSPs), as highlighted by the CDG report, could be useful both in Africa-to-Africa migration and Africa-to-Europe. They can be supported by the Commission, but not instigated by it. The Flanders region has already enacted a GSP: it pays for ICT training in Morocco, and some of the workers stay in the local market while others come to Flanders to resolve local labour shortages. That allows for legal, permanent migration opportunities without depriving the local markets of talent. Both sides should find the political will to discuss new migration opportunities, rather than remaining dogmatically focused on migration control and enforcement.
Overall, if the EU truly wishes to have a sibling-like relationship with Africa, that will involve much more sharing and compromise. A solution on legal migration is of particular interest to Africa and something the EU will have to find the political will for, and the reduction of EU trade barriers would benefit both partners in the long run as Africa continues to grow and do business with Europe. Moving away from a donor-recipient relationship means that the EU will be dealing with a much more organised, powerful and assertive African Union than that of 20 years ago. The post-Cotonou dialogue is a fork in the road. Whether the two continents take the well-travelled route or dare to try something different will determine their intertwined future for decades to come.
A True European Citizenship: for Brexit and beyond
© User:Colin / Wikimedia CommonsAs the threat of a hard Brexit looms, many British nationals living in the EU fear for their rights and status. Personally, I have been working in Belgium since January as a British citizen myself. Removal of our EU citizenship rights would mean that, among other things, we lose our right to work without a permit. Belgium will guarantee our rights until the 31 December 2020, but ‘no decision has been taken yet’ on what happens afterwards. Imagine trying to make future plans with that in mind. Imagine being used as a bargaining chip. Then, imagine that nobody was willing to reform EU citizenship to save you and others from a similar fate.
Looking at the existing citizenship laws, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union‘s (TFEU’s) Article 20 states: “Citizenship of the Union is hereby established. Every person holding the nationality of a Member State shall be a citizen of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be additional to and not replace national citizenship.” It goes on to detail the rights that accompany this EU citizenship. The Charter of Fundamental Rights also sets out citizens’ rights.
Neither document deals with the possibility of losing EU citizenship. They establish it as a condition linked to Member State citizenship, and it might be assumed that it can only be lost when Member State citizenship is lost. For example, an Italian who becomes Japanese and must give up their Italian citizenship also gives up their EU citizenship. Other ways to lose citizenship are involuntary, including living abroad for an extended period, obtaining another citizenship, serving in the military of a foreign country, treason, fraudulent application for citizenship or conducting terrorist activities.
However, it is currently possible to lose your EU citizenship without losing your Member State citizenship. This is the situation that 65 million British people face, due to the result of the Brexit referendum. Although attempts have been made to protect their rights, they will be less comprehensive than maintaining EU citizenship. The New Europeans (a citizens’ rights platform) has a Green Card proposal, which could provide third country nationals who are EU permanent residents with similar rights to EU nationals.
This is a great contribution to this policy field, but does not completely resolve the problem. Although permanent residents would maintain their freedom of movement and right to work within the EU, those who have not yet lived in their host country for 5 years would still be deprived of those rights. If a British person moves to Spain for a year, then studies in France for 2 years and finds a job in Belgium, only the time they have worked in Belgium counts towards residency. They may have lived in the EU for 3 years already, but EU citizens’ rights are linked to a particular Member State.
As such, more radical solutions would be needed in order to protect the rights of British people who have been exercising their freedom of movement for less than 5 years in a particular Member State. “British in Europe”, an organisation of British immigrants to the EU, made an impassioned plea to both sides of the negotiation to ring-fence the rights of UK citizens in the EU and of EU citizens in the UK, so they would be protected come what may. This call was echoed by the European Citizens’ rights, Involvement and Trust (ECIT) Foundation: proposing to guarantee the existing rights of UK citizens in the EU and allow them all to remain long enough to qualify for permanent residence.
There have also been judicial activism attempts on this matter, notably an attempt to obtain a ruling interpreting Article 20 TFEU from the European Court of Justice as to whether British citizens automatically lose their EU citizenship as a result of Brexit. This was initially referred to the ECJ but then overturned on appeal. Another attempt to obtain such a ruling was also rejected by the Dutch courts.
The closest available answer to this question comes from a study requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Constitutional Affairs. ‘Acquired rights of individuals’ is a legal concept referring to rights that people have been given by the law and which persist through changes of the legal system. However, it concludes that there are no ‘acquired rights’ in relation to EU citizens’ rights and the four freedoms of the single market.
It is hard to blame one of the complainants of the second case above for, in a comment on the ruling against an ECJ referral, questioning “whether being a European has meant anything for the past 40 years. Maybe it hasn’t.” Although ring-fencing citizens’ rights would protect the rights of those currently affected, it would not resolve the question of what European citizenship really means, nor would it protect the rights of any current EU citizens whose Member State made the (unlikely) decision to follow in Britain’s footsteps.
Associate citizenship would have provided an opt-in form of EU citizenship, in which UK citizens would pay into the EU budget in exchange for maintaining their current status. Guy Verhofstadt MEP and some British civil society actors have looked favourably on this proposal. However, it is both legally and politically complex: possibly requiring treaty change and allowing UK citizens to possess an additional citizenship which is not subordinated to or controllable by the UK state authorities.
Similarly, a European Citizens’ Initiative calling for Permanent European Union Citizenship was declared admissible by the Commission. It did not succeed in gathering sufficient support, but sought to get the Commission to propose a way to avoid citizens losing their EU citizenship as a result of their Member State leaving, and to turn EU citizenship into a permanent acquired right. Decoupling EU citizenship from Member State citizenship would also solve the issue of building up residency time while moving around Member States. To revisit the example above, those 3 years could count and the person would be well on their way to permanent residence.
Admissibility is a recognition that the Commission has the power to act on a particular issue. The legal and political detail would be complex to agree on, but the EU has traditionally been forced to grow and change by unforeseen crises.
The moral case for taking this opportunity to reform is obvious and compelling. Being a European has to mean something in order for the European project to progress. In order to truly provide the people of the EU with a meaningful form of citizenship, it must not be arbitrarily and collectively removable as a result of a political choice by their Member State. For many of them, it is a birthright. It should be respected and protected as such.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Source: PixabayMost people online have probably seen the photos of the Amazon burning, as they spread rapidly across social media and developed into a hashtag. As with any online movement, it has suffered from its fair share of misleading content but has also pushed world leaders to act. The EU is no exception to this: its painstakingly negotiated trade deal with Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) hangs in the political balance.
Emmanuel Macron spotted an opportunity. In threatening to block the deal, he was able to challenge Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro who allowed people to set fires without having to worry about being punished. France, alone, would not have the economic weight to enforce environmental norms, but the sheer weight of the EU market gives it a potentially high level of impact. Chad Damro, an academic, described this phenomenon as Market Power Europe. In other words, the vastness of the single market means that access controls, EU regulations, and interest contestation within it naturally have a knock-on effect on other countries and foreign firms. As such, the EU can and does use its market in carrot and stick measures, and deploys it to encourage its partners to adopt EU policies and norms.
The reality follows the theory to an extent, concerning EU action in Latin America. It shapes the environmental agenda through dialogues, development aid, Association Agreements and environmental programmes. Its Association Agreements and Free Trade Agreements with Latin American countries are conditional on upholding certain environmental positions. However, the EU’s influence levels in Latin America are weaker than in its neighbourhood. It is also hard to detach the impact of a specific EU contribution from similar measures by other countries and international organisations. Using its single market as an incentive is often a substitute for deploying sanctions. As described in Ian Manners’ concept of a Normative Power Europe, it is the EU’s different identity (derived from its history and governance) that leads it to seek consensus and convince rather than impose.
Shaming and pressure only work if domestic leaders are receptive to such input. The EU has similar mechanisms relating to human rights and trade, including a ‘human rights clause’ as an essential part of trade deals which can result in the suspension of the whole agreement. Such clauses have not yet been invoked, although the EU also has a Generalised System of Preferences+ (GSP+) scheme which provides additional trade benefits on developing countries and is conditional on ratification and implementation of particular international agreements. So far, the EU has inconsistently used withdrawal threats with varying degrees of success: it succeeded in convincing El Salvador to change its constitution to ratify an International Labour Organisation convention, but could not sufficiently pressure Sri Lanka to address rights violations.
In Cambodia, which has duty-free access to EU markets under the Everything But Arms scheme, preferential tariffs aimed at increasing land investment inadvertently also incentivised the state to seize land and evict people against their will to facilitate sales to agro-industrial developers. This led the EU to begin to consider preference removal, which is a long process and has no coercive impact in the meantime if the Cambodian government is not receptive. This is relevant to the current situation, as Bolsonaro has made repeated remarks about developing on indigenous land and integrating the people there (who wish to maintain their current system and culture) into mainstream Brazilian society.
Indeed, the European Parliamentary Research Service notes that some suggest the EU has the most power at the stage of negotiations it has currently reached with Mercosur: “when it can still withdraw the conclusion of the agreement unless the other party improves its commitment to human and labour rights.” It, sensibly, reminds us that the Commission has to weigh up all the potential impacts of a trade agreement as to the increased openness, dialogue, and contacts between the parties that come with economic liberalisation have the potential to lead to additional progress. Indeed, civil society can also benefit from the accompanying environmental and human rights dialogues in EU agreements and obtain more opportunities to mobilise for reform at home. Free trade should not be restricted at all: as part of an effective development package, it is a vital tool for reducing poverty, and the slowing growth in global trade puts that at risk.
Member States know that, and value domestic economic growth highly on their priority lists. It is worth looking at the experience of the EU-Canada agreement (CETA). The European Parliament fought tooth and nail for human rights conditionality in CETA, against Canada’s wishes. Despite Canada’s traditionally strong human rights record, the European Parliament insisted on the inclusion of a human rights clause in the deal, which the Canadians initially saw as unnecessary. It has not always pushed as strongly for such clauses but chose to operate tactically as a result of growing civil society and public focus on trade deals. Macron has arguably done the same. He spotted an opportunity to fight with a populist leader on an issue which had erupted into the public consciousness, while tactically avoiding confrontation with French farmers (much to the chagrin of other Member States.)
Overall, this situation is a microcosm of wider EU trade policy issues. Market Power Europe could have an exceptional amount of leverage with its partners and with global markets. If it was willing to overcome its squeamishness about hard power, it could successfully push other actors to fall in line with its human rights and environmental policy priorities while maintaining its ever-more-vital role as a defender of global free trade and economic openness. It could consistently and successfully spread European economic and human rights norms to its partners, in a beneficial manner for Europeans and the planet as a whole, but instead only uses this vast potential when the stars align to make it politically convenient for a leader or institution to do so.
