Holding the tobacco industry accountable: Why countries struggle to get redress

While the health and economic costs of smoking amount to billions of dollars for public health systems worldwide, only a few countries have succeeded in forcing the tobacco industry to compensate states. An investigation by The Examination media outlet[1] highlights the legal, procedural, and policy barriers that have prevented most governments from making cigarette manufacturers pay for tobacco-related illnesses. This finding calls for strengthening regulatory tools and remediation strategies so that governments can effectively hold tobacco industry players accountable in a manner that promotes public health and, more broadly, the general interest.

The facts: very few cases of successful case law

More than fifty years after the first legal action was brought against tobacco manufacturers, the conclusion remains clear: few governments have succeeded in legally recognizing the liability of cigarette companies for the health and economic damages associated with their products. Outside of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada, the majority of state lawsuits have ended in failure, abandonment, or interminable proceedings.

In the United States, the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) concluded in 1998 remains the landmark. This agreement, reached after several years of legal battles between US state attorneys general and major tobacco manufacturers, required the latter to pay approximately $206 billion over twenty-five years. The companies also had to abandon certain advertising practices and make public millions of internal documents exposing their manipulation and disinformation strategies. This agreement, unparalleled elsewhere, marked a turning point in the recognition of the tobacco industry's responsibility, while strengthening the global documentary basis for tobacco control.

However, transposing this model to other legal contexts has proven extremely complex. In most countries, attempts at class actions or prosecutions by public authorities have encountered inadequate legislative frameworks and unfavorable case law. The article by The Examination lists more than sixty public actions carried out since the early 2000s in around twenty countries: Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, South Korea, South Africa, France and the Philippines. In the vast majority of these cases, the courts dismissed the complaints on the grounds that the industry's liability could not be directly established for the illnesses or health costs caused by tobacco.

The Canadian case is a notable exception. After more than twenty-six years of litigation, the provinces reached a $23.1 billion settlement in 2023 with three manufacturers—Imperial Tobacco, Rothmans Benson & Hedges, and JTI-Macdonald—to offset the public costs of smoking. This settlement, while significant, remains isolated and results from a peculiar combination: provincial legislation adopted in the 1990s to allow the government to sue manufacturers on behalf of the healthcare system, and a strong political will to see the matter through to its conclusion despite the financial and procedural pressure exerted by the tobacco companies.

Conversely, in Europe, no action of comparable scope has been successful. In France, legal initiatives have often been brought by associations such as the National Committee Against Smoking (CNCT) or individual victims. In Spain and Italy, class actions have also failed, often due to statutes of limitations or the lack of a legal basis for health authorities to take action on behalf of the population.

This low number of successful state-level cases reflects a structural imbalance: an industry with considerable legal and financial resources, faced with states with insufficient legislative tools to bring the notion of health and environmental responsibility to justice. As long as these asymmetries persist, the tobacco industry will continue to enjoy near immunity, despite the colossal costs it imposes on the community. Beyond the financial issue, the lack of significant convictions deprives public health policies of an essential lever: that of official recognition of manufacturers' fault. It also perpetuates a dangerous narrative according to which the harms of tobacco are primarily the result of individual choices, and not of an organized industrial strategy.

The legal and strategic obstacles that block appeals

While the idea of suing tobacco companies for compensation seems legitimate from a public health perspective, in practice it faces multiple legal and procedural obstacles. In the majority of cases, courts have held that governments lack "standing," meaning they cannot present themselves as direct victims of harm caused by the tobacco industry. This restrictive interpretation of causation—considering that the costs of treating smoking-related diseases result from individual decisions to smoke, not from corporate misconduct—has led to many lawsuits being dismissed. In other words, the causality between industry practices and harm to healthcare systems is deemed too "indirect" to be legally recognized.

Adding to this difficulty is the complexity of the evidence. Courts often require that each public expenditure or pathology be linked to a specific act by a manufacturer, even though the effects of smoking are part of collective and long-term dynamics. This individualized approach makes it almost impossible to attribute an overall cost to the industry, even though the industry has deliberately maintained doubts about the harmfulness of its products for decades, concealed internal studies, and manipulated scientific data. This strategy continues today, in other forms, through the promotion of new products and the dissemination of "harm reduction" arguments. It underscores the need to provide States with effective legal tools to hold manufacturers accountable and put an end to these persistent practices of interference.

At the same time, tobacco companies are deploying extremely aggressive procedural strategies. Recourse to jurisdiction, systematic appeals, requests for referral, and litigation over the validity of procedural acts are routinely used as delaying tactics and creating a wall of procedural money. The goal is not only to prolong cases for years, but also to exhaust plaintiffs and deter potential future actions. These tactics, combined with considerable financial resources, allow the industry to weaken the resolve of states and wear down their administrative capacities. Time thus becomes an instrument of defense: the longer the proceedings last, the greater the likelihood of dismissal.

Finally, the American situation, often cited as an example, has paradoxically weakened international remedies. The Master Settlement Agreement resulted in a compromise without a judgment, preventing the emergence of solid case law that could have inspired other countries. In the absence of recognized case law precedents, foreign courts have rarely dared to venture into such complex terrain, particularly in civil law systems. This combination of obstacles—legislative gaps, the difficulty of establishing direct evidence of the facts, the slowness and cost of procedures, and the deterrent power of industry—explains why, despite the overwhelming evidence of manufacturers' deceptive practices, almost all actions for compensation have ended in failure.

Towards effective accountability of the industry

By evading all financial responsibility, manufacturers continue to transfer the colossal cost of the damage they cause onto the community—more than seven million deaths each year worldwide, millions of sick people who jeopardize the health systems of many countries, hundreds of billions of dollars in public health expenditures, to which are added other major negative externalities such as the millions of tons of plastic waste from cigarette filters. This situation reinforces a profoundly unbalanced economic model: a private industry reaps massive profits, while governments bear the human, social, and environmental consequences of its products alone, anti-tobacco activists point out.

In the face of this persistent impunity, Article 19 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) now constitutes a central legal lever. This article calls on Parties to "consider the adoption of legislative and judicial measures to address civil and criminal liability, including compensation" in cases of harm related to tobacco products. In other words, it encourages States to equip themselves with the necessary tools to hold manufacturers liable and obtain compensation. However, more than twenty years after the adoption of the FCTC, its application remains limited: few countries have incorporated specific liability provisions into their domestic law, and even fewer have actually used them.

The FCTC COP11, to be held in Geneva in November 2025, could mark a turning point on this issue. One of the major items on the agenda will focus on the practical implementation of Article 19, with the aim of strengthening cooperation between States, sharing good legal practices, and examining common ways to hold industry accountable. Several delegations, particularly European and Latin American, are advocating for a coordinated approach based on the concept of extended or full producer responsibility, inspired by environmental law, in order to shift the financial burden of damage onto the manufacturers themselves. This development would go far beyond the simple "social responsibility" claimed by the industry: it would enshrine strict legal liability, aligned with the principles of environmental justice and public health.

In this context, the issue of compensation is no longer just a matter of litigation, but a global governance imperative. Ending the legal impunity of tobacco manufacturers would amount to recognizing the systemic and industrial nature of the tobacco epidemic. Furthermore, by defining sanctions commensurate with the damage caused by the activities of tobacco manufacturers, the Parties could protect themselves from repeated violations of the existing texts and would put an end to the notion of lucrative misconduct. These provisions would also free up new resources to finance prevention, cessation, research, and tobacco waste management. At a time when the international community is discussing a global treaty against plastic pollution and the costs of non-communicable diseases are exploding, integrating the principle of producer responsibility into the heart of anti-tobacco policies appears to be an essential requirement.

©Generation Without Tobacco

AE

[1] Maria Perez, Smoking costs countries billions in health care. Just two have forced tobacco companies to pay up, The Examination, published October 22, 2025, accessed October 27, 2025