Cigarette personal import limits upheld but with altered reasoning

Language of warning labels becomes new limiting factor

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The Finnish Parliament passed unanimously a law on Tuesday, which retains unchanged private citizens’ import limits of tobacco products from the Baltic States. This went through in spite of the fact that the EU is in the process of freeing the restrictions on personal imports.
     
The EU has ordered that at the end of this year the tax laws must no longer limit the personal importation of tobacco products as part of luggage from the Baltic States into the old member countries.
      Finland, in turn, has decided to introduce the language in which the cigarette packs’ warning labels are printed as the new basis for restricting the imports.
     
According to the new law, a person cannot bring into the country amounts of tobacco products exceeding the set limits, if the products have not been equipped with warning labels in Finnish and Swedish.
      The set limits will remain at their present levels: 200 cigarettes, 50 cigars, 100 small cigars, or 250 grams of loose tobacco.
      The government suggested originally that even possession of tobacco products that lacked the correct warning labels in quantities exceeding the set limits would be made illegal.
      The possession ban, however, was deemed unreasonable by the Parliamentary Committee for Constitutional Law, and this clause was omitted from the law in the parliamentary handling.
     
On the whole, even within Parliament the use of the language of the warning labels as a premise for limiting the personal imports was described as an “artificial” solution.
      The amendment was ultimately passed to prevent smuggling and to curtail health risks.
      The government defended its view by referring to Austria, which has already passed a similar restriction law leaning on language.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Retailers group against tighter law on tobacco products (13.5.2009)
  Ministry official: no blanket censorship of smoking images (9.2.2009)
  Finland considers further tightening of Tobacco Act (5.2.2009)
  Anti-smoking committee wants much heavier restrictions on all nicotine products and their substitutes (19.12.2008)

Helsingin Sanomat