EU planning stricter smoking laws, including banning cigarette filters

An internal EU paper written ahead of the upcoming World Health Organisation (WHO) Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) has outlined stricter smoking and tobacco laws across the bloc.

EU internal paper outlines stricter smoking laws for WHO conference

According to a report from the Austrian daily newspaper Kronen Zeitung, the EU has drawn up a plan to further restrict smoking and tobacco sales across the bloc. The plan will be presented at the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control at the end of November.

New restrictions outlined in the paper include: reducing the number of places where tobacco can be sold, banning tobacco and smoking advertisements across the EU, and banning cigarette filters. The explanation of the third part of the plan is that, while cigarette filters minimise the negative effects of smoking, they are damaging to the environment.

Finally, the bloc outlines plans to prevent people born after a certain year from ever being able to purchase tobacco, cigarettes or vapes. A so-called “smoke-free generation” law banning the sale of cigarettes to anyone born after 2008 was introduced in New Zealand in 2022 but scrapped by the subsequent government in 2023.

The WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control will take place between November 17 and 26 in Geneva, Switzerland.

WHO has previously raised concerns about German smoking laws

In previous editions of the WHO’s annual report on global tobacco consumption, the health organisation has raised specific concerns about Germany’s smoking and tobacco laws. Following the publication of the 2023 report, Director for Health Promotion at the WHO, Rüdiger Krech, said that the current smoking policy in Germany was of “great concern”. 

Across the federal republic, buying cigarettes and tobacco is still affordable. According to the German Cigarette Association (Deutscher Zigarettenverband), a packet of 20 cigarettes costs an average of 9 euros in 2025.

While there is an indoor smoking ban, many bars and nightclubs allow customers to smoke, and though smoking is prohibited on public transport, it is allowed in most other public spaces, such as in parks, outside shops or on the street.

Krech pointed out that such lax attitudes to smoking in public spaces “cause a lot of suffering and lead to unnecessarily high pressure on the [German] health system". Krech said Germany’s indoor smoking ban should be more consistently enforced and that the government should pick up the pace when it comes to protecting residents from smoke.