Turf battle over French advertising ban

Date: 19/06/1997

A CRUCIAL trial of strength for the single market is taking place this week as European Commissioners' top aides decide whether to keep alive challenges to sweeping French laws banning alcohol advertising.

Critics of the Commission's past failures to proceed with legal action warn that a decision by officials to drop four cases against France for banning on health grounds the television screening of rugby and football games with alcohol advertisements would encourage other member states to erect similar obstacles and put the single market back 20 years.

Internal Market Commissioner Mario Monti was already on the defensive ahead of today's (19 June) quarterly meeting on single market infringements. His officials were arguing for a postponement of any decisions on France's Loi Evin ban on alcohol advertising until December as the best chance of keeping the cases alive. However, aides to French Commissioners Yves-Thibault de Silguy and Edith Cresson and Employment and Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn are likely to call for the cases to be shelved immediately.

The Commission recently decided to close another case against Paris for banning sponsorship of the 1998 football World Cup by US brewer Budweiser - a package rumoured to be worth more than 8.7 million ecu.

The loss of such one-off contracts has angered sports federations in France and helped to widen the issue beyond an argument for and against the protection of public health in recent weeks.

However, it was a previous Socialist government which introduced the Loi Evin and the new administration is unlikely to makes changes.

Dutch Liberal MEP Jessica Larive has written to Commission President Jacques Santer pointing out that it is illogical for the European Parliament to be considering Commission proposals for new guidelines on scrutinising whether advertising bans are acceptable while, at the same time, Commissioners appear to be ignoring them.

A Commission Green Paper on commercial communications has suggested new objective criteria to test whether measures such as the Loi Evin ban on sponsorship can be justified. One test would be whether the measure was strictly necessary or 'proportionate' to the goals set out.

“It appears to me that if the proportionality rule proposed in the Green Paper had been used in evaluating the Budweiser complaint, it would not have been dropped,” said Larive.