These statements angered parliamentarians in Egypt, and they issued warnings to government ministers, the head of the Egyptian Football Association and the head of the Sharkia Tobacco Club, and a request was submitted to Parliament.
The representatives are Abdel Moneim Imam, head of the Justice Party and Secretary of the Planning and Budget Committee in the House of Representatives, and Ahmed Qinawy, a senator from the Justice Party. And Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Eastern Tobacco Club.
The warnings included that they came in response to what came in the statements of Hani Aman, managing director of the Eastern Company for Tobacco, on one of the television programs, where he expressed his desire to mobilize the audience of smokers as fans of the Eastern Tobacco Club team – the Eastern Company Club now – in a way that represents the promotion of tobacco products, In contravention of the international laws and treaties concerned with combating tobacco products, of which Egypt is considered one of the parties to which it is bound by the provisions of its articles concerned with the control of tobacco products, according to the two representatives’ confirmation in their warnings.
The Justice Party also issued a statement against the incident, stressing that these statements constitute a violation of national laws and international treaties related to tobacco control.
Request to change the name of the club
Representative Abdel Moneim Imam said that he submitted a request for a briefing on this matter in Parliament, where he also demanded to change the name of the club during its participation in the Premier League, because the name “Eastern Company” is linked to the tobacco industry, which represents a promotion of smoking and its products, and since the International Convention on Tobacco Products Control stipulates: The right of every human being to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health.
Imam pointed to a set of measures emphasized by that agreement to limit the use of tobacco and exposure to smoke resulting from burning it, including banning and restricting all forms of advertising and promotion of tobacco products to limit its use, as well as the need to provide assistance to quit smoking and provide appropriate treatment for it. And support related to education, communication, training and awareness of the harms of smoking.
He continued, “Egypt signed the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in June 2003 and ratified it in February 2005, and since 2008 the Egyptian government has obligated all tobacco-producing companies to put warning labels on tobacco products.”
He stressed that Egypt faces a real problem with regard to the increase in the number of smokers, “according to the latest reports of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics in 2020, the number of smokers in Egypt reached about 18 million smokers, which constitutes about 17.7 percent of the total population in the age group 15 years and over Which indicates the need to adopt the previously mentioned measures to limit the increase in the number of smokers, given the health burden it poses to state facilities.
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