Officials from 146 countries agreed to push for legislation to ban smoking in public places, to enforce the laws once passed and to negotiate a global treaty ending tobacco smuggling, WHO officials said.

All 146 countries, which recently ended a week-long meeting in the Thai capital, Bangkok, are parties to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) first agreed on in 2005. Public health officials agreed to establish guidelines directing their governments to pass anti-smoking laws for public spaces. The guidelines themselves are not legally binding in the countries, and no deadline has been set for anti-smoking laws to be passed.
The tobacco smuggling agreement will try to use international law to stop billions of cigarettes from disappearing onto the black market annually, officials said. It is estimated that governments lose to the illegal tobacco trade more than USD 40 billion (€ 29 billion) in unpaid taxes each year. The sale of contraband cigarettes in 2006 accounted for 10.7 per cent of total global sales, according to the Framework Convention Alliance, an international alliance of tobacco control organisations.