The Sages censured the provision of the Macron bill which aimed to relax the legislation on alcohol advertising, a text voted in Parliament in a controversial context.
All is not lost, for the defenders of the Evin law on alcohol advertising. Several provisions of the bill “Economy: growth, activity and equal economic opportunities”, more commonly called Macron bill, were rebutted by the Constitutional Council. Among them, article 225, at the heart of many controversies.
Inform, promote
This article aims to relax the conditions of alcohol advertising, to introduce a distinction between “information” and “communication” around alcoholic products. A rather fuzzy border, which made the health authorities and associations specialized in addiction jump, which denounce a dangerous “unraveling” of the Evin law, encouraged by the lobbying of wine.
Faced with this outcry, the government itself proposed last June an amendment to “clarify” the first text, originally carried by the senator of the Gironde Gérard César (The Republicans).
According to this new article, “are not considered as an advertisement or a propaganda, the contents (…) relating to a region of production, to a toponymy, to a reference or a geographical indication, to a region, to an itinerary, to a production area, to the know-how, to the history or to the cultural, gastronomic or landscape heritage linked to an alcoholic drink having an identification of the quality or the origin ”, specifies the article. Not enough to convince these associations … Not even the Constitutional Council, which censored the article.
Legislative rider
However, the Sages did not comment on the substance of the text. If they retested it, it was because of a procedure considered to be irregular. The Council indeed considered that the provision was part of the “legislative riders”, these texts introduced by way of amendment, without any link, even indirect, with the bill.
Fragile, but still in place, the Evin law has been the subject of numerous attempts to challenge it. During the examination of the health bill, the National Assembly had already adopted an amendment against the advice of the government in order to relax alcohol advertising. Supported by the Socialist deputy Denys Robiliard, the text was finally abandoned, at the express request of the Minister of Health.
“Taking into account the repeated offensives of the alcohol lobby, under cover of the development of wine tourism, there is no doubt that the measure could be reintroduced in another text”, reacted the association Federation Addiction in a statement. communicated, while reiterating its will to mobilize “so that the unraveling of the Evin law ceases” and so that “the protection it provides, which is even more necessary in a context as addictogenic as ours”, is preserved.
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