“In Brussels, they talk of ‘regulatory simplification,’ yet in international forums, they negotiate new layers of global bureaucracy, from tobacco to digital health and climate governance,” wrote analyst Javier Villamor in an article for The European Conservative. “But beyond the sanitary or environmental narrative, the plan represents a new attempt by Brussels to concentrate fiscal and regulatory powers at the expense of the Member States.”

Analyst Javier Villamor warns that the European Union’s push at international forums is less about streamlining rules and more about shifting power away from national governments. In an article for The European Conservative, he argues that Brussels is using global meetings—from tobacco conferences to digital health and climate talks—to build fresh layers of international bureaucracy that will then be folded into EU law.

Villamor points specifically to the EU’s approach to the World Health Organization and the upcoming tobacco control conference (COP11). He contends the real aim is to transfer regulatory authority from member states to international agencies without democratic oversight, with Brussels prepared to automatically adopt WHO-aligned measures into EU legislation.

“What appears to be a technical step is, in reality, the transfer of Europe’s regulatory sovereignty to an international agency with no democratic legitimacy,” Villamor wrote. “Brussels not only intends to sign commitments on behalf of the Member States but also to incorporate them automatically into EU law through the forthcoming revision of the Tobacco Products Directive. In practice, this would mean that decisions taken in Geneva offices could become binding bans in Madrid, Rome, or Warsaw—without parliamentary debate or national impact assessment.”

As part of this trend, Villamor says, Brussels is considering a broad suite of restrictions, bans, and taxes on products containing tobacco or nicotine while framing the moves as public health and environmental policy. The plan would include fiscal changes under the Tobacco Excise Directive (TED) and Tobacco Excise Duty on Raw Tobacco (TEDOR), measures that could let the EU directly collect up to 15% of national excise revenues and allow duty increases of up to 900% on certain products.

Observers, Villamor notes, warn these changes would centralize authority, erode the principle of subsidiarity, and could damage the livelihoods of more than 80,000 European tobacco producers and small retailers—even as they may benefit third countries like Morocco and China.

“The so-called ‘anti-tobacco crusade’ becomes a vehicle for recentralizing authority and financing the EU’s bureaucratic machinery under the guise of public health,” Villamor wrote. He describes a feedback loop where Brussels funds international organizations, those organizations press for alignment with the WHO, and the Commission then presents those demands as a “civil society consensus”—a cycle he says leaves citizens paying to lose sovereignty.

Villamor also highlights an irony: countries with strong smoking-reduction results—like Sweden, which he credits with cutting smoking rates to around 5% through regulated alternatives such as snus and nicotine pouches—risk being penalized for following national policies that fall outside WHO orthodoxy.

His critique frames these developments as a broader struggle over who decides public health and fiscal policy in Europe: national parliaments or international bodies whose decisions can be folded into EU law without fresh domestic debate.