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Dreams and Diseases: Regulating Food and Alcohol Marketing for Healthier Societies

29 October 2015, 6:00 pm–7:00 pm

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Event Information

Open to

All

Organiser

Current Legal Problems 2016-17

Location

UCL Pavilion (Main Quad), Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

Speaker: Professor Amandine Garde (University of Liverpool)
Chair: Professor Gerard Hastings (University of Stirling)
Admission: Free
Accreditation: This event is accredited with 1 CPD hour with the SRA and BSB
Series: Current Legal Problems 2015-16

About the lecture

Over the last twenty years, a range of studies have established that alcohol and food marketing affects consumption preferences.

However, in stark contrast with what has happened for tobacco products, public authorities in the UK, in Europe and beyond have been extremely reluctant to restrict the marketing of alcoholic beverages and food high in fat, sugar and salt, preferring to rely instead on the self-regulatory commitments or ‘pledges’ of food and alcohol industry operators.

In May 2013, the 194 States of the World Health Assembly – including the UK and the 27 other European Union Member States – unanimously adopted the World Health Organization Global Action Plan on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases for 2013-2020.

This Action Plan calls on Member States to – among others – halt the rise in diabetes and obesity and reduce by at least 10% the harmful use of alcohol worldwide by 2025.

Marketing restrictions are identified as cost-effective and likely to contribute to these objectives. Marketing restrictions also offer the potential to promote the right to health and other related fundamental rights, whilst reducing health inequities.

However, the gap between international commitments and national intervention in the UK, in Europe and beyond is blatant.  This reluctance to impose legally binding restrictions on alcohol and food marketing raises a range of questions, both ethical and legal, which this lecture proposes to focus on.

About the speaker

Amandine Garde is Professor of Law and Head of Department at the University of Liverpool.

Her research interests lie in the fields of EU Internal Market, Consumer, Advertising, Food and Public Health Law. In particular, she has developed an expertise on the legal aspects of obesity prevention and other risk factors for non-communicable diseases such as tobacco and excessive alcohol consumption.

Her book EU Law and Obesity Prevention (Kluwer Law International, 2010) is the first to offer a critical analysis of the EU’s Obesity Prevention Strategy, and she is co-editor of Regulating Lifestyle Risks: the EU, Alcohol, Tobacco and Unhealthy Diets (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

She is the author of several reports on food marketing to children and obesity prevention, and she has provided a series of training sessions on the role of legal instruments in the prevention of non-communicable diseases for the World Health Organization and other organizations.

She is a member of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Science and Evidence to the WHO Commission on Ending Childhood Obesity.

She has also been involved in a range of policy initiatives for the European Commission, the UK Government, the Scottish Government, the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies, as well as the National Institute for Health Education and Promotion (INPES) and the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM) in France.

She regularly lends her advice to a broad range of NGOs and governments worldwide. She is the founder and director of the newly launched Law and NCD Prevention Research Unit at the University of Liverpool.

Amandine Garde previously lectured at King’s College London, at the Faculty of Law in Cambridge, where she was also a Fellow of Selwyn College, at the University of Exeter and at the University of Durham.

She also spent a year as a postdoctoral Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence in 2005-2006 and is a qualified solicitor having trained at Simmons & Simmons in their London and Paris offices.

About the Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems annual lecture series was established over sixty years ago. The lectures are public, delivered on a weekly basis and chaired by members of the judiciary.

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) annual volume is published on behalf of UCL Laws by Oxford University Press, and features scholarly articles that offer a critical analysis of important current legal issues.

It covers all areas of legal scholarship and features a wide range of methodological approaches to law. With its emphasis on contemporary developments, CLP is a major point of reference for legal scholarship.

Find out more about CLP on the Oxford University Press website