Trade ministers from a dozen countries signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) said includes a block on tobacco companies from using the pact to challenge national tobacco-control measures.

Ministers accepted a compromise put forward by the US to exempt tobacco products from the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, ASH said in a statement. “We would have preferred a blanket exemption for tobacco in the agreement,” as proposed by Malaysia earlier in the talks, said Laurent Huber, ASH executive director. “However ISDS was the most worrisome aspect of the TPP, and now the tobacco industry cannot use it.”
More than five years of talks held behind closed doors preceded agreement on the pact to liberalize trade and investment among countries representing about 40 per cent of the global economy. National governments now must ratify the pact.