Swiss vote to ban testing on animals

Geneva Feb. 13: The Swiss were voting Sunday on whether to ban almost all advertising of tobacco products and separately on a blanket ban on all animal testing.

In-person voting on those and other topics as part of Switzerland’s direct democracy system began at 10:00 am (0900 GMT), with polls due to close just two hours later. Since most people vote in advance by post, the final results were expected by late afternoon. Recent polls indicate that the initiative to tighten Switzerland's notoriously lax tobacco laws by banning all advertising of the health-hazardous products wherever minors might see it — effectively nearly all settings — is the most likely to pass. Switzerland lags behind most wealthy nations in restricting tobacco advertising — a situation widely blamed on hefty lobbying by some of the world's biggest tobacco companies headquartered in the country.

Currently, most tobacco advertising remain s legal at a national level, except on television and radio, or ads that specifically target minors.

Some Swiss cantons have introduced stricter regional legislation and a new national law is pending, but campaigners gathered enough signatures to spur a vote towards a significantly tighter country-wide law.