Restaurants to expand non-smoking areas next year

The Kingdom’s restaurants will allocate 50 per cent of their capacity for non-smokers in 2012 in a step towards becoming smoke-free in 2013, a Ministry of Health official said on Tuesday. Malek Habashneh, director of the ministry’s awareness department, said the increase in non-smoking space comes as part of an agreement between the ministry and the Jordan Restaurants Association (JRA) that stipulates gradual implementation of a smoking ban in the country’s restaurants. “We started at the beginning of this year, when restaurants allocated 30 per cent of their capacity for non-smokers,” he explained, noting that the gradual implementation seeks to change people’s attitudes before a blanket ban is implemented. Habashneh noted that since the beginning of the year, the ministry has referred 90 smokers to court and issued warnings to 550 for violating the Public Health Law, which prohibits smoking in public places. Issam Fakhr Eddin, head of the JRA, said customers are accepting the change in restaurants and most are asking to sit in areas designated for non-smokers. He said the JRA is still working on a mechanism to deal with restaurants that serve argileh, but anticipated that “those coffee shops licensed to serve argileh will continue doing so, as non-smokers realise that these places do serve argileh and they should not go there if they want to avoid smoke”. Meanwhile, Habashneh called on other government institutions, especially the education, interior, and environment ministries, to cooperate with the health ministry in enforcing the Public Health Law. “If these ministries cooperate with us, we will succeed in the full implementation of the law,” he said, citing as an example the country’s 4,900 schools, which the health ministry cannot monitor without the cooperation of the education ministry. The Public Health Law, which prohibits smoking in public places, began a gradual process of implementation in early 2009. The law was enforced in shopping malls and Queen Alia International Airport in March 2009, and in fast-food restaurants that June. In 2010, the Cabinet issued a decision to prohibit smoking in ministries and public institutions, which went into force on May 25 that year. According to the law, smoking is prohibited in hospitals, healthcare centres, schools, cinemas, theatres, libraries, museums, public and non-governmental buildings, public transport vehicles, airports, closed playgrounds, lecture halls, and any other location to be determined by the health minister. The law also stipulates that any person caught smoking in a public place is subject to between one week and one month imprisonment or a JD15-JD25 fine. The same penalties apply to those who sell cigarettes to minors. Approximately 61 per cent of Jordanian families have one member who smokes some type of tobacco, including cigarettes, pipes, cigars and argileh, according to a 2010 study conducted by the Department of Statistics found.