NHIS Holds Seminar Ahead of Tobacco Lawsuit 'Appeal Brief Submission' to Discuss First Trial Issues

▲National Health Insurance Service

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Ji-hee] The National Health Insurance Service (NHIS) announced on the 1st that it held an "International Seminar on Tobacco Litigation" jointly with the Korean Association on Smoking and Health and the Korea Council on Smoking and Health to gather opinions from domestic and international experts on the first-instance tobacco lawsuit ruling and to discuss future litigation response strategies.

On November 20th last year, the Seoul Central District Court ruled against the NHIS, not even recognizing the causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. In response, the NHIS immediately filed an appeal and appointed the law firm DaeRyukAju as external litigation counsel. After reviewing the trial records, the newly appointed DaeRyukAju plans to submit a statement of appeal to the Seoul High Court on the 2nd, focusing on errors in the first-instance ruling and areas requiring additional hearings.

At the seminar, Professor Jung Sang-hyun of Sungkyunkwan University School of Law criticized the first-instance ruling, stating, "Although the parties, claims, and evidence differ from the precedent Supreme Court case, the court mechanically reiterated the previous Supreme Court ruling. By arbitrarily distinguishing between specific and non-specific diseases and imposing strict proof burdens on the victims, it practically made it impossible to prove causality for diseases caused by harmful substances. Moreover, in lawsuits holding tobacco companies accountable, there was no judgment on the risks of tobacco products or the risks known by the defendants at the time of manufacture, import, and sale." He added, "I question whether the court, which judged that social perceptions of tobacco have not changed, is detached from the reality we live in and belongs to a different dimension."

Professor Alex Broadbent of the University of Johannesburg, author of "The Philosophy of Epidemiology," expressed that the reasons given by the first-instance court denying causality with smoking were all unreasonable. He emphasized, "It is a reasonable inference that the lung cancer in this case (squamous cell carcinoma, small cell carcinoma) was caused by smoking. Demanding proof that the cancer was caused by factors other than smoking is akin to asking to prove that a victim shot by a gun did not die from any cause other than the bullet." Therefore, in the NHIS tobacco lawsuit, tobacco companies should bear the burden of proving that the lung cancer was caused by factors other than smoking.

Professor Lee Doo-gap of Seoul National University compared the case with U.S. tobacco litigation, explaining, "Since the 1980s, new evidence on tobacco addiction and advances in the neuroscientific understanding of addiction have led to tobacco companies losing lawsuits. During litigation, it was confirmed that tobacco is a drug designed for addiction to maximize tobacco companies' profits, and that scientific facts and evidence about this addiction were systematically concealed and distorted by tobacco companies." He argued, "The NHIS tobacco lawsuit ignores facts clearly revealed in U.S. courts, such as tobacco companies' sophisticated evidence production, addiction design, and concealment."

Neil Collishaw, Director of Research at Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, who played a leading role in winning the tobacco lawsuit in Quebec, Canada, pointed out the vastly different outcomes between Canadian and Korean tobacco lawsuits. He stated, "The class action lawsuit in Quebec, which recognized the largest compensation for damages in Canada, won even at the appellate level, but due to tobacco companies' bankruptcy protection filings, compensation has not been paid and the case is still ongoing after 20 years." He added, "The favorable rulings in Canada are the result of decades of failures. To win lawsuits against the tobacco industry, procedural insight from legal teams resisting tobacco industry lawyers' strategies, internal documents of tobacco companies, and institutional support including legislation are necessary."

In the subsequent comprehensive discussion, attorney Jung Mi-hwa, who handled individual lawsuits by smoking victims and the first-instance NHIS tobacco lawsuit, pointed out, "The U.S. RICO case ruling is 1,700 pages, and the Canadian class action appellate ruling is 415 pages, but our first-instance ruling is only 33 pages excluding appendices," emphasizing the need for a change in the judiciary's perspective on tobacco lawsuits. Lee Yoon-shin, Director of Health Promotion at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which plays a central role in tobacco regulation policy, stressed, "Tobacco lawsuits play a very important role in clearly informing the harms of smoking. Smoking is not merely a matter of individual will but a public health issue involving social costs borne by the entire population, and many policy supports and efforts are being made at the national level to address this."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.