Skip to ContentSkip to Navigation
About us Faculty of Law Current Affairs News News Archive

The Rights of Children to a Tobacco-free Environment

11 October 2016

Globally, tobacco use is the largest preventable cause of cancer. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), tobacco kills nearly six million people a year, including more than 600,000 non-smokers exposed to second-hand smoke. Children are particularly vulnerable when it comes to smoking. Research indicates that 90% of adult smokers begin while in their teens, or earlier, while two-thirds become regular, daily smokers before they reach the age of 19. In the Netherlands, 23% of the adult population (www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/49105858.pdf) and 9% of adolescents smoke on a daily basis. Every day, 100 Dutch children start smoking.

The negative consequences of smoking raise various questions in relation to human rights protection. Globally, trade, tax, and public health related measures are introduced including plain packaging and public and private smoking bans to diminish this major public health crisis.

Against this backdrop and taking the health rights of children as a start point, the project Tobacco Control, The Rights of Children to a Tobacco-free Environment aims to strengthen the regulation of tobacco, with a specific emphasis on such regulation in Europe. As such, the project has three interconnected goals:

  1. Analysing and identifying the rights of children to a tobacco-free environment
  2. Generating new knowledge on tobacco control regulation in Europe
  3. Creation of European Network on Law and Tobacco (ENLT)

This project is carried out by Marie Elske Gispen , LLM, and GHLG Director Prof. Brigit Toebes . Marie Elske joined GHLG in September 2016 as post-doctoral researcher. She will defend her PhD thesis on access to controlled medicines and aspects of drug control regulation in January 2017 at Utrecht University. The three-year project is carried out with a grant from the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF).


This article was published by the Faculty of Law.

Last modified:19 January 2024 08.45 a.m.
Share this Facebook LinkedIn
View this page in: Nederlands

More news

  • 22 April 2025

    Impact | Online advice about right to freedom of assembly

    In the coming weeks the nominees for the Ben Feringa Impact Award 2025 will introduce themselves and their impactful research or project. This week: Noor Swart and Berend Roorda, on their online information initiative on the right of freedom to...

  • 22 April 2025

    How do you shield yourself from Big Tech's power?

    How can we all become less dependent on Big Tech? A topical and urgent question that is also arising within the University. Recently, a petition by a group of staff members made the rounds that called for the University to break away from Google and...

  • 15 April 2025

    The Faculty of Law launches podcast The Right to News

    On 16 April 2025, the Faculty of Law at the University of Groningen will launch the first episode of its podcast The Right to News (in Dutch: Recht op Nieuws). The theme of the first episode is: “Can the government just ban organizations in the...