To what extent does a tobacco carve-out protect public health in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement?

Katherine Hirono; Deborah Gleeson; Becky Freeman

doi:10.1071/phrp2621622

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

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To what extent does a tobacco carve-out protect public health in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement?

Katherine Hirono ^A ^* , Deborah Gleeson ^B and Becky Freeman ^C

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation, University of New South Wales, a member of the Ingham Institute, Sydney, Australia

^B School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

^C School of Public Health, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

^* Correspondence to: k.hirono@unsw.edu.au

Public Health Research and Practice 26, e2621622 https://doi.org/10.17061/phrp2621622

Published: 15 April 2016

2016 © Hirono et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence, which allows others to redistribute, adapt and share this work non-commercially provided they attribute the work and any adapted version of it is distributed under the same Creative Commons licence terms.

Abstract

In November 2015, negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement came to a close with the release of the final text. It included an optional carve-out (exclusion) for tobacco control measures from the TPP’s investor-state dispute settlement mechanism. Despite the apparent ‘win’ for the field of tobacco control, the limited scope of the carve-out provides only partial protection for public health regulatory measures.