2012 Annual Report

Download SFP's latest Annual Report for a detailed look at SFP's work.

On 29 February 2012, SFP held a high-level conference on pictorial warnings and plain standardised packaging in the European Parliament, Brussels. Hosted by a group of cross-party MEPs, the conference set the debate as to why pictorial warnings and plain packaging are needed in the upcoming revision of the Tobacco Products Directive.

The TobTaxy project was successfully concluded in December 2012. Two more workshops were held in the course of 2012 and a TobTaxy toolkit was launched in twenty European languages. The toolkit is freely available on SFP’s website and aims to be a resource for the health community that explains tobacco taxation policies, while providing economic arguments for raising taxes on tobacco products, an effective measure in the fight against tobacco consumption.

On World No Tobacco Day 2012, SFP published a research paper entitled “Block, Amend, Delay: tobacco industry’s efforts to influence the European Union’s Tobacco Products Directive (2001/37/EC).” The report exposes the strategies which the tobacco industry used to slow the progress of the current Tobacco Products Directive and weaken its content through the EU decision-making process between 1999 and 2001.

• In September 2012, SFP launched a new, streamlined and more user-friendly website with a dedicated site for TobTaxy, where all the resources regarding the project including the TobTaxy toolkit are freely available and easily accessible.
• As of January 2013, Smoke Free Partnership welcomed an additional partner, Action on Smoking and Health (UK) (ASH (UK)). ASH (UK) is a campaigning public health charity that works to eliminate the harm caused by tobacco and is represented on the SFP Board by its Chief Executive Deborah Arnott.