Australia Restricts Company Logos on Cigarette Packs

Australia’s highest court upheld a law on Wednesday that prohibits tobacco companies from using their logos on cigarette packets, a decision that means smokers could see more of the graphic images associated with their habit: blistered, cancer-stricken mouths; children sick from secondhand smoke, and gangrenous limbs.

In a brief statement, the High Court of Australia rejected a challenge by tobacco companies to the country’s Tobacco Plain Packaging Act, adding that it would publish its reasons at a later date. But the decision curtails tobacco companies’ use of their logos and brand names.

British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco, Japan Tobacco and Philip Morris Australia had argued that the new ban on brand logos would infringe on their intellectual property rights. The court rejected that argument.

The outcome of the case had potential global ramifications because it could set a precedent for other countries seeking to introduce harsher labeling requirements for tobacco products, he wrote.

Tobacco companies said the plain-packaging regulations would make it easier for smuggling or counterfeit trade in cigarettes and said the legislation’s sponsors offered no evidence that the rules would help people quit.

Packs already come with graphic depictions of the effects of smoking-related diseases, but the new rules go further. Brand logos and colorful designs will be banned, with only a small space remaining where the brand name and variant of the cigarette can be printed, Mr. Siegel wrote. Packages will be required to be a uniform shade of olive green.

Australia’s minister of health, Tanya Plibersek, said on her Twitter account and in a joint statement with Nicola Roxon, the attorney general, that it was a victory for anyone who had lost someone to a smoking-related illness.

The group called Hands Off Our Packs said last week it had accumulated hundreds of thousands of signatures of smokers on a petition opposing “excessive regulation” and “nanny state” moves of the government in working for plain packaging of cigarette brands.

In the United States, efforts to regulate the cigarette packages and advertising have also gone through the courts. A provision to a 2009 act directed the Food and Drug Administration to require larger, graphic warning labels covering the top half of the front and back of cigarette packs by Sept. 22, 2012, as well as 20 percent of print advertising for cigarettes.

The photos the F.D.A. selected for the labels, such as a man breathing smoke out of a tracheotomy hole in his neck, are similar to some on cigarette packaging in Canada, my colleague, Stephanie Strom, wrote in February. But a federal judge later declared the requirement unconstitutional.

Hear what Tanya Plibersek thinks on plain packaging and how it can save lives;