COP-3: in praise of smaller countries.

One of the interesting aspects of FCTC negotiations is the “one party, one vote” rule. That is, any country, big or small, has the same right to be heard, so long as it has ratified the convention. That means that the United States, producer of much of the world’s tobacco control research, source of tobacco industry documents and of influential programmatic models (California, Massachusetts, etc), joins Argentina and a few other countries in the peanut gallery at the back reserved for non-ratifying countries. Meanwhile, even …