Background:
Over the past 10 years, the WHO FCTC has served as a powerful tool to initiate, support, and advance national and global tobacco control efforts. However success of FCTC, but must not be allowed to conceal the fact that the job of tobacco control is far from done. This paper examines the tobacco legislations of various countries ratifying WHO FCTC with an objective to ascertain the status of prohibition of importation, sale and manufacturing of smokeless tobacco products. In addition, experiences of some countries that prohibit the sale, import or manufacture of these products were also studied.

Methods:
A literature search was conducted using PubMed, Google scholar, tobaccocontrollaws.org databases for all articles from January 1st, 2005 to May 2017 with the following search terms in the title, abstract, or keywords: ´smokeless tobacco', 'snuff', 'chewing tobacco', 'dip tobacco', 'tobacco regulation', 'SLT ban', tobacco', or 'SLT import ban', 'SLT sale ban', 'SLT manufacturing'. In the first stage of screening, an internal protocol was used to screen the titles and abstracts for all records according to a pre-defined selection criteria . In the second stage of search the WHO FCTC reports, previous CoP reports, WHO expert consultation reports were scrutinized to obtain desired information.

Results:
The sale of smokeless tobacco products is prohibited in 42 Parties of the world that have ratified WHO FCTC and their laws are available in English language. Most of these bans are partial. Ten countries have prohibited manufacturing SLT products and five countries have imposed ban on its importation. The impact of these bans has been different for different countries.

Conclusions:
A comprehensive tobacco control strategy with effective tobacco cessation programme needs to be formulated that assists SLT users in quitting. In addition, multi-sectoral efforts are needed for effective implementation of the bans imposed by Governments.