Imagine the following scenario. You fork out US$20 million for a party, getaway trips to exotic Maldives and Fiji, but you don’t have a say over who gets to go to it.

Sounds ridiculous, right?

Meet the World Health Organisation (WHO) under Margaret Chan.

In hosting the FCTC Conference of Parties (COP) every two years, it has not only banned journalists and the public from covering or viewing the proceedings, it now wants to be able to decide who gets to attend their event, even if other nations pay for it.

Why would an international agency under the United Nations umbrella do this?

Well, because they wish to ban all government representatives who interact with the tobacco industry. In fact, with the next one being held in New Delhi next month, even hosting nation India might be banned from attending.

Other nations that could be banned include Cuba, China, Egypt, Italy, Bulgaria and even Thailand. Let me remind you, these are nations that actually pay the WHO but have been denied access.

For Italy, its ministers holding the portfolios of Economy, Agriculture, Economic Development and even Health respectively risk being banned from attending the conference. Why? Because Italy happens to be the leading producer of cigarettes in Europe.

According to the documents sourced from the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control, the WHO called for ‘the exclusion of representatives of States holding a monopoly, even partial, in any tobacco industry’. It also wishes to remove ‘elected officials and the executive, legislative and judicial branches of governments’ from attending.

This is rather awkward, since Article 8 of the United Nations Charter clearly says that it shall place no restrictions on the eligibility of men and women in any capacity and under conditions of equality in its principle and subsidiary organs.

Also, the Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in Relations with International Organisations clearly says that states may freely appoint members of their respective delegations in Article 43.

And thus, the list of banned people from a taxpayer funded international conference under the WHO now includes elected representatives, members of the legislative branch of governments, farmers, the public at large, media, the industry itself, and even law enforcement.

In case you missed it, any law enforcement agency acting to combat the illicit cigarettes is also banned from attending the conference. You can ask Interpol about that one.

Yet, these are the very things being discussed at COP - tobacco taxation, litigation and even illicit cigarettes.

Well, isn’t that confusing?

Somehow members from health ministries of some 180 sovereign nations are being asked to be experts in areas they know nothing about. And of course, since the proceedings have banned the media from covering it, there is no way to determine how decisions were reached.

Most opaque manner possible

Instead, any coverage would only happen after these decisions affecting billions of people worldwide have been made in the most opaque manner possible.

And then, there is the shame factor produced by the FCTC. In 2012, the European Union (EU) was awarded a ‘Dirty Ashtray’ for going against the grain and insisting on its rights to harmonise taxes.

You read right - the WHO gave the EU a mock award to be highlighted internationally for not wanting to let the world health agency determine the sovereign rights of tax policy.

At this point one wonders, if this could be the reason many nations are pulling out from funding the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The WHO Status for Payments of Voluntary Assessed Contributions by July 2016 shows that 79 percent of the 180 countries that make up the FCTC have yet to give it the voluntarily promised funds for this year.

In fact, WHO chief Margaret Chan even goes so far to ask for all nations - Malaysia included - to increase its annual contribution by another 10 percent. I wonder if this will be mentioned further by our Malaysian prime minister in his budget tabling this month.

Not only does the WHO want to decide the list of attendees, they want more money from every nation’s taxpayers to hold this party.

Chan herself seems to be zealous in the WHO’s non-smoking crusade, to the point of being rather oblivious to the world.

On June 9, the WHO chief awkwardly took time to warn Syrians in the midst of armed conflict that they should implement “plain packaging” to reduce the appeal of cigarettes.

Not only do the Syrians have to fear for their lives while bombs fall out of the sky, they also had to be lectured on how it is important that in their country cigarettes should be sold in plain packets.

Similarly in 2015, the WHO also gave an award to Turkmenistan - a nation run by a dictator who intimidates the press - for issuing a presidential order banning cigarettes nationwide.

By all means, let us have a proper holistic debate with regards to tobacco control. But by all regards, the WHO does no such thing by excluding stakeholders, the public and even the press from participating, and penalising people for standing up for their nation's rights.

Thus, perhaps it is time to abandon this and look afresh for a better forum which will come out with a more equitable solution.