Call for clearer provision over no-smoking rule

The Malta Chamber of Commerce and Enterprise said it agreed in principle with the Smoking in Public Places Regulations 2003 but voiced its serious concern that these regulations hold the owner or the management of a place of business responsible for anybody unlawfully smoking on their property.

The chamber said it was the act of smoking that should put someone in breach of the law and not the act of owning or managing an office, restaurant, hotel or any other public building.

The owner or management should not be found guilty of any offence if it was proven that all precautions were taken in terms of the law. The manner in which this rule would be enforced was, at best, unclear.

The government should not take the usual easy way out and shift all responsibility onto the entrepreneur, the chamber said.

"By the same token, are ministers and heads of departments responsible on the same level as commercial operators? If not, then the law is discriminatory," the chamber charged.

Besides smoking, there are other health and environmental hazards that are negatively influencing the health of citizens or disrupting their daily lives against the government has not enacted the necessary laws to eliminate such hazards. Otherwise, the chamber added, if the relevant laws already existed, they were not properly enforced either through lack of political will or because the authorities, for some reason, were unable to impose the power bestowed upon them by the law.

The chamber urged the government to refine those aspects of the smoking law which render it discriminatory and to enforce such regulations and other laws in the environmental field that were equally conducive towards healthier living patterns for all Maltese.