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The Summer 2018 volume of the Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly has been published this morning. Just in time for tomorrow’s seminar, and building on my earlier paper in the QUT Law Review, it contains the following piece by me:

“A Little Parthenon No Longer: The Proportionality of Tobacco Packaging Restrictions on Autonomous Communication, Political Expression and Commercial Speech” (2018) 69(2) Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 175-211

Abstract
This paper evaluates the constitutionality of statutory restrictions upon tobacco packing in Ireland. It concludes that public health and the protection of children constitute pressing and substantial reasons sufficient to justify the Public Health (Standardised Packaging of Tobacco) Act 2015 and Part 5 of the Health (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2017 as proportionate restrictions upon tobacco companies’ freedom of political expression protected by Article 40.6.1 of the Constitution and freedom of autonomous communication protected by Article 40.3.1.

In many respects, Ireland has been a world leader in tobacco control, from banning smoking in the workplace or in cars with children, to requiring standardised packaging. Part 1 introduces this article; it sets out the background to the 2015 and 2017 packaging legislation. Part 2 of this article, on restrictions, describes the restrictions in the packaging legislation. Part 3 of this article, on rights, provides a conspectus of the Irish constitutional speech rights engaged or burdened by these restrictions. This Part presents these rights as comprising a freedom of political expression in Article 40.6.1 of the Constitution and a freedom of autonomous communication in Article 40.3.1. Moreover, these two rights carry concomitant rights to keep silent and to be informed. Part 4 of this article, on reasons, considers the pressing and substantial reasons which the State may proffer to seek to justify the restrictions in the packaging legislation upon constitutional speech rights. Part 5 of this article, on standards of review, considers the extent to which the restrictions in the packaging legislation, motivated by concerns relating to public health and the protection of children, satisfy the current Irish version of the principle of proportionality. It also considers the extent to which the restrictions might satisfy other standards of review or scrutiny. Part 6 concludes this article, bringing together all of the strands of analysis in the previous Parts. And it concludes that, if the restrictions on constitutional speech rights in the Public Health (Standardised Packaging of Tobacco) Act 2015 and in Part 5 of the Health (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2017 are challenged by the tobacco companies, the courts will find that those Acts are constitutionally valid.

Attractive packaging is an important element of a product’s effective marketing. Indeed, so central has packaging been to the allure of smoking that Leonard Cohen could extol “the little Parthenon / of an opened pack of cigarettes”. Ireland has been in the vanguard of tobacco control worldwide. With the 2015 and 2017 packaging legislation, it continues to set a very important example. The constitutional validity of these packaging restrictions would underpin a crucial element of the Department of Health’s moves towards tobacco-free Ireland by 2025. And the pack of cigarettes, with large warning photos dominating standardized packaging, would be Cohen’s little Parthenon no longer.

An earlier version of the paper, under the title “Is Standardised Tobacco Packing a Proportionate Restriction on Constitutional Speech Rights”, was delivered at the ICON-S British and Irish Chapter Inaugural Conference, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, on 5 September 2017.

In today’s Irish Times, this week’s instalment (audio here) in the ongoing mis-adventures of Ross O’Carroll Kelly intersected with this blog. Ross is a hapless dad and clueless (if ruthless) estate-agent, who has been described as “Ireland’s most eligible married man” and “the greatest Irish [rugby] player never to actually make it in the game”, and the scene opens with our hero being summoned by the boss:

It’s, like, just before midday when Lauren tells me she wants to talk to me in her office. … She goes, “What do you know about GDPR, Ross?”

I’m like, “Quite a lot, actually.”

Oh, that shocks her – such is my reputation for being as stupid as a goose.

She’s like, “Okay, tell me what you know about GDPR.”

“First,” I go, “you make sure the patient is comfortable by putting some kind of cushion under their head and loosening any tight clothing. Then, you place the heel of your hand on the patient’s breastbone, with your other hand on top of it, interlocking your fingers …”

“That’s CPR, Ross.”

And so it goes on for a while, until Dave – “from Human Resources (formerly Payroll)” – arrives, and asks Ross where his laptop is. Poor Ross. We know from last week’s column (audio here) that he had left his car unlocked at a filling station, from which someone stole his “laptop bag, a briefcase and three Donnybrook Fair shopping bags out of the boot”. So, Ross eventually comes clean to Lauren:

I’m there, “Okay, I’m going to be finally honest with you. They were stolen from the boot of my cor when I pulled in to get petrol. Was there any sign of the three shopping bags from Donnybrook Fair that were also taken? There was six tins of individually, line-caught, white tuna fillets in there that cost 11 yoyos per pop.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“Er, why would I tell you about it? It was my laptop. They were my client files.”

“I’m the Managing Director of this estate agency, Ross. It’s my responsibility to report breaches to the Data Protection Commissioner as soon as they’re discovered. Do you know what the penalties for this could be?”

“Chill out, Lauren. There’s no real damage done.”

And that’s when she says it. She fixes me with a look and goes, “You’re fired, Ross.”

As he will no doubt quickly learn, GDPR stands for the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. It, and its incorporating Irish legislation, came into effect on Friday 25 May 2018. And the theft of the laptop and files (and, let’s not forget, tuna fillets and other overpriced groceries) came to light in the column published on Saturday 26 May. If the Saturday column is real-time reportage, or if it is reporting something that happened on Friday, then the data breach happened after the GDPR and Irish legislation came into force, and Lauren does indeed have to report it to the Data Protection Commission. However, if the column is reporting something that happened earlier in the week, then the GDPR was not in force, and the Rossmeister might just get away with it – again.

Australia and Ireland were the first two countries in the world to introduce legislation to require standardized packing of tobacco products. As Olivia Kelly reports in the Irish Times that the Minister of State for Health Promotion, Catherine Byrne TD launched a landmark Report on the State of Tobacco Control in Ireland to mark World No Tobacco Day yesterday, I’m delighted to announce that a seminar on this topic will be held from 2:00pm to 4:00pm on Tuesday 12 June 2018 in the Neill Lecture Theatre in the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin.

The main speaker will be Prof Matthew Rimmer (QUT); I will respond to his presentation; the seminar will be chaired by Prof Shane Allwright (TCD); and there will be plenty of time for questions and answers.

Matthew Rimmer (pictured right) is Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation in the Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has recently edited a special issue of the QUT Law Review on the plain packaging of tobacco products worldwide. At the seminar, he will talk about the Australian plain packaging legislation, and the failed challenges to it in the Australian courts, on foot of an investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong, and before the World Trade Organisation.

In response, I will talk about the Irish plain packaging legislation, the failed challenge to it in the Irish courts, the failed challenge to similar UK legislation in the UK courts and before the Court of Justice of the European Union, and the slim prospects for success of future possible challenges.

Shane Allwright will chair the seminar. She is Emeritus Fellow, retired Associate Professor of Epidemiology, and former Registrar, Trinity College Dublin. She chaired the Working Group on the Health Effects of Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS) in the Workplace, whose 2002 Report (pdf) led to the introduction in Ireland of the world’s first outright ban on smoking in the workplace in 2003.

The seminar is open to the public, and all are welcome to attend, but booking is essential.

New politics certainly make for interesting times. Minority governments are no strangers to defeats, even to two defeats in one day, but yesterday marked another milestone, when the government lost not merely two votes, but votes on two successive legislative amendments. They both related to the protection of children in the Data Protection Bill, 2018. The first will make it an offence to process the personal data of a child for the purposes of direct marketing, profiling or micro-targeting; the second will set the digital age of consent at 16. In fact, seeing the writing on the wall, rather than suffer the indignity – surely unique, even in this era of new politics – of four defeats in one evening, the Minister accepted a third amendment and declined to press a fourth of his own. The third amendment that he accepted will permit not-for-profit bodies to seek damages on behalf of data subjects; and the amendment that he withdrew would have undercut the effect of the third successful amendment. (The three successful amendments are amendments 14, 15 and 115 here (pdf), amending this version (pdf) of the Bill, and debated here). Earlier versions of all three successful amendments had been defeated by the government at every previous stage of the Bill. Time will tell if any of them proves significant, but the one that has generated the most coverage so far is the amendment to the digital age of consent.

The aim of the Bill is to incorporate the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) into Irish law. Article 6(1) GDPR sets out six bases for lawful processing of personal data, the first of which, specified in Article 6(1)(a), is that “the data subject has given consent to the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes” [on consent, see ICO | WP29]. A child can, in principle, provide such consent; but a minimum age at which children as data subjects can consent to having their personal data processed is not specified in the GDPR. Article 7 GDPR provides that the controller must be able to demonstrate this consent, and the younger the child is, the more difficult it will be for the controller to do so. To these flexible general rules relating to the consent of children, Article 8 GDPR provides a bright-line exception, which has become known as the digital age of consent. (more…)

Today is World Intellectual Property Day. On a day to celebrate the role that intellectual property rights play in encouraging innovation and creativity, we should take care that IP law does not achieve the opposite result. I blogged yesterday about the press publishers’ right in Article 11 of the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Today, I’m staying with the proposed Directive, and with another open letter (pdf, via here) that I’ve signed articulating some of its shortcomings. In this letter, academics from 25 leading Intellectual Property research centres in Europe express grave concerns at the legislative direction of the proposed copyright Directive, and in particular with Articles 3, 11 and 13:

• the proposed exception for text-and-data-mining in Article 3 will not achieve its goal to stimulate innovation and research if restricted to certain organisations,
• the proposals for a new publishers’ right under Article 11 will favour incumbent press publishing interests rather than innovative quality journalism [I blogged about this yesterday], and
• the proposals for Article 13 threaten the user participation benefits of the e-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC) which shared the responsibility for enforcement between rightholders and service providers [I blogged about this at an earlier stage in the process].

Today is also Poetry Day Ireland; but poetry the proposed Directive certainly is not. But you govern in prose; and the prose of the proposed Directive could be improved by revisting Article 3, 11 and 13.

In a statement published this morning, 169 academics working in a variety of fields from all over Europe give a final warning against the EU Commission’s ill-conceived plans for the introduction of a new intellectual property right in news.

Here are some extracts from the statement:

Statement from EU Academics on Proposed Press Publishers’ Right

We, the undersigned 169 scholars working in the fields of intellectual property, internet law, human rights law and journalism studies at universities all over Europe write to oppose the proposed press publishers’ right.

Article 11 of the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, as it currently stands following negotiations in the EU Council and Parliament, is a bad piece of legislation. … The proposal would likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy. This is because it would create very broad rights of ownership in news and other information. … This proliferation of different rights for established players would make it more expensive for other people to use news content. … The proposed right would provide no protection against ‘fake news’. … There is no sound economic case for the introduction of such a right.

The academic community is virtually unanimous in its opposition to the European Commission’s proposal for a press publishers right. … it is important to understand that press publishers already have very significant rights in their publications. … [Moreover], Rapporteur Voss’s proposed amendments will make matters even worse. …

Conclusion
We call on all MEPs to oppose the Commission proposal, and with yet more determination, Mr Voss’s amendments. It is time to reject, once and for all, this misguided legislative reform.

My colleague, Giuseppe Mazziotti, and I are among the signatories. Read the full statement here (pdf) or here (html). It joins an open letter earlier this month from 56 organisations encouraging the deletion of Article 11.

The question in the title was provoked by Ciara Kenny‘s House Hunter column in today’s Irish Times, where she ask Would you buy a house someone had been murdered in? I don’t think I would. And if I did, I’d be stuck with it, since the answer to the question in the title to this post is that you can’tget out of the purchase of a house, if you find out later that someone had been murdered in it. Ciara’s column is a diary of her travails trying to purchase a house in Dublin in today’s crazy property market (as she put it on twitter: it’s an effing nightmare). From today’s column:

Every old house has its secrets. Last summer, a gorgeous house came up for sale which we spent weeks deliberating over. But we couldn’t shake a bad feeling we had about the surrounding streets. So when bidding climbed above what we were willing to pay, we were relieved for once. … [Later, my partner found] a decade-old RTÉ news report about a man stabbed to death by a burglar on the stairs. … I don’t think I would be able to shake the image of that poor man’s violent death every time I walked upstairs.

If Ciara had bought the house, and later discovered its gruesome past, she would not have been able to reverse the transaction. (more…)

The Irish Independent this morning reports that the first of the plain cigarette packets have hit shelves around the country:

Tobacco products bearing the new standardised packaging are now available in some Irish retail outlets. From September, all cigarettes and all other tobacco products will have to be sold in plain or standardised packaging by law.

The Department of Health have issued a press release in which the Minister of State for Health Promotion and the National Drugs Strategy, Catherine Byrne, welcomed the news that products using the new plain packaging can now be found in some outlets:

Gone are the familiar colours and logos of the various brands and instead all cigarette boxes will be in the same plain neutral colour [pictured above left], bringing into sharp focus the health warnings on the packets. … Our aim is to decrease the appeal of tobacco products, to increase the effectiveness of health warnings and to reduce the chances of consumers being misled about the harmful effects of smoking. This packaging makes it plain that cigarettes are bad for your health. … Standardised packaging is just one of a number of measures outlined in Tobacco Free Ireland (pdf), the ultimate aim of which is to encourage and help smokers to quit and to prevent young people from starting to smoke.

On 10 March 2015, when the President signed the Public Health (Standardised Packaging of Tobacco) Act 2015 (also here) into law, Ireland became the second country in the world — after Australia — to enact legislation requiring standardised tobacco packaging. (more…)