Apart from the adoption of the EU Tobacco Products Directive, insufficient progress in tobacco control has been made in Europe. For this reason we have made eight recommendations to be implemented before the seventh European Conference on Tobacco and Health.

Countries should:

1. Implement in their tobacco control programmes at least the six measures described in the introduction; a comprehensive tobacco control policy is an obligation under Article 4 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).
2. Introduce standardised/plain packaging.
3. Ban the display of tobacco products at the point of sale.
4. Address tobacco industry interference in public health policy making, in accordance with the guidelines on Article 5.3 of the WHO FCTC.
5. Spend a minimum of €2 per capita per year on tobacco control.
6. Introduce comprehensive smoke free legislation in line with the guidelines on Article 8 of the WHO FCTC.
7. Adopt strong guidelines on taxation at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the WHO FCTC in Moscow in October 2014, and adopt a new EU tax directive in 2016, which should result in significant tax increases and smaller tax differences between cigarettes and hand rolled tobacco.
8. Ratify the FCTC protocol to eliminate the illicit trade in tobacco products and implement a traceability system for tobacco products in an EU and European context.