Cigarette Package Labelling, in Australia and the U.S.

If you'll be in London on June 29, Andrew Mitchell will be talking about Australia's plain packaging for cigarette legislation at the UCL's WTO Scholars' Forum:

Next month the Australian Government will introduce legislation to require the plain packaging of tobacco products by 1 July 2012. It will remove branding logos and other promotional elements from packaging, which will be standardised with olive brown colouring and the brand name appearing in a plain white font. It will be the world’s first tobacco plain packaging scheme, and given the restrictions on other forms of marketing, will shut down one of the last remaining avenues for the advertising of tobacco in Australia. Predictably, the tobacco industry has taken issue with the initiative. Their objections include a claim that it violates Australia’s WTO obligations, in particular the minimum obligations for the protection of intellectual property rights under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. With governments in the UK and a number of other jurisdictions also considering introducing plain packaging to reduce the use of tobacco products, this presentation will critically examine the claims of the tobacco industry.

In the U.S., things have not gone quite as far, but I can imagine that the following new rules might cause concern with some tr...