Tobacco Asia

Volume 19, Number 1

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tobaccoasia 21 STORY TELL YOUR BR AND WITH BOEGLI-GR AVURES Boegli-Gravures can help you to develop subtle, refined and ingenious ways of elevating your brand's characteristics and enhance your consumer brand experience. Let us partner with you to bring new dimensions to your marketing. www.boegli.ch Patents pending. health and safety– an open declaration that WHO clearly gives less priority to fighting illicit tobacco products, a huge health problem that is only grow- ing with every passing year and in no small part thanks to WHO's own actions to undermine the tobacco industry's cooperation with law enforce- ment agencies all over the world. The plenary also decided to adhere to the COP4 and COP5 practice of excluding the public from committee proceedings, and even rejected an Australian proposal to allow members of the pub- lic into the room as long as they signed an under- taking that they were not affiliated with the tobac- co industry. No member of the public was allowed to attend under the pretext that members of the public were actually agents of tobacco companies. Even though WHO never formally voted to ban the media from attending the event, members of the press were also prevented from sitting in on virtually all events and proceedings. Washington Times editorial writer Drew Johnson reported be- ing physically escorted out of the convention hall by a security guard, while a German reporter was physically restrained from entering the meeting. Soon after, all kinds of Internet problems start- ed, as reported by Dick Puddlecote: "A $40,000 wifi facility was also wasted when tweets dried up on the second day, and Instagram accounts which had been sharing pictures went silent soon after. It seems that WHO was desperate to ensure nothing escaped to the outside world about what they were discussing. This was perhaps because of the other astonishing abuses of transparency and democrat- ic procedure getting out of the sealed room - cour- tesy of the Washington Times's Drew Johnson - some deeply sinister." Johnson tweeted the following: "During the debate over the UN/WHO global tobacco tax, a delegate from Kyrgyzstan was held down & silenced when he tried to oppose" and "EU,Japan, China & others oppose WHO's proposed e- cig regulations, but leaders are currently attempting to pass policies without a vote" as well as "I'LL TELL YOU WHEN TO SPEAK: Discussion was cut off when a UN/WHO tobacco convention delegate raised questions about the global tobacco tax." The media blackout thus become understand- able – such outlandish violations would have been front page news, if it had not been for the gag or- der issued by WHO.

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