A reflection on the experience of COP-3: Thailand’s perspectives

Correspondence to: Jonathan D Liberman, The Cancer Council Victoria, Australia; jonathan.liberman@ cancervic.org.au Competing interests: Jonathan Liberman was Framework Convention Alliance (FCA) policy director from March 2006 to December 2008, a period that included both COP-2 and COP-3. The FCA is an international non-governmental organisation representing over 350 NGOs from more than 100 countries, working towards the effective development and implementation of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Like any legal document, a treaty houses countless possibilities. The words of the document are critical, but they can only ever be part of the story. It is not ultimately the text that gives the document breath, but the imagination and the efforts of those who interact with the document and determine what kind of life it leads in the real world. The life of the FCTC has two primary, interrelated components: the international work of the Conference of the Parties (COP), and on-theground implementation. When things work well, the relationship is a dynamic one. The COP promotes implementation—primarily through its standard-setting, assistance mobilisation and implementation monitoring roles—and its work is informed by the successes and challenges of domestic tobacco control activities. COP-3 continued the COP’s impressive early performance as a standard-setter. But there is much work to do in its other roles—in ensuring that those standards are turned into real on-the-ground outcomes. My role at COP-3 was as policy director of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). FCA actively contributes to the activities of the COP, bringing to the work of the parties the vast expertise, experience and energy of global civil society. While the COP is an intergovernmental body, the importance of civil society participation is recognised in the FCTC as ‘‘essential in achieving the objective of the Convention and its protocols’’ (article 4.7). The impressive policy outcomes of COP-3— primarily strong guidelines on implementation of articles 5.3 (protection of public health policies with respect to tobacco control from the commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry), 11 (packaging and labelling of tobacco products) and 13 (tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship)—will doubtless be detailed elsewhere. But in a short personal reflection, even a lawyer finds himself more moved by the momentum that the FCTC embodies and generates, and the people who bring life to it, than by the text itself—the political champions of countries from New Zealand to Thailand, and Palau to Uruguay; the civil society representatives who come from all corners of the globe to advise, support, cajole and, where necessary, criticise governments into action; and the fascinating political processes through which governments at all stages of tobacco control negotiate their way to collective agreement on such high standards. It is an amazing process to watch and to be part of.