A team consisted of 59 legal experts has been formed in China to facilitate the country's work on tobacco control.
According to the international Framework Convention on Tobacco Control which came into being in May 2003 and formally went into effect in China in January 2006, the signatories of the FCTC must produce a law to protect the public from tobacco and smoke and they must ban smoking from all public places in their country or region within five years of the FCTC formally taking effect in their country.
Though China has been a signatory of FCTC for more than four years and there is only one year left for it to fully carry out the rules of FCTC and make its public places totally smoking free, there are still no national tobacco control laws in China. Furthermore China's tobacco control work is far from satisfactory. According to Chinese media, in a WHO report on the implementation of tobacco control, China only one scored one out of a possible 10 in tobacco control, which makes it lag far behind of the other countries that are signatories of FCTC.
Cui Xiaobo, a representative of the 59-member legal expert team, has stated that the Chinese government is committed to fulfilling the FCTC rules and if it does not work well on the matter, this will not only do no good for the health of Chinese people, but it will also damage the Chinese government's reputation in the international community.
