No clear direction appears to have been obtained at the Council experts’ meeting that took place on Friday 18 November. This meeting focused on legislative proposals concerning rules on endocrine disruptors. One source close to the dossier even described the meeting as a “non-meeting”.
Nevertheless, it did provide an opportunity for member states to discuss the changes recently introduced by the European Commission to its legislative proposals. It should be pointed out that the Commission presented three criteria in the middle of last June for identifying and ultimately banning chemical substances that dangerously interfere with the human hormone producing system (see EUROPE 11573): 1) the appearance of unwanted side-effects; 2) the endocrine mode of action (which helps explain the effect at a cellular and molecular level); 3) correlation between the two previous criteria. Above all, on 9 November, it distributed an amended version of this proposal on “biocides and pesticides”, in an effort to clarify certain controversial provisions (see EUROPE 11664). The main change consisted in identifying the agents that “demonstrate” unwanted side-effects rather than those that are ”known” to cause unwanted effects, which in itself, would not have changed very much.
Only Austria supports the proposal
The meeting on 18 November enabled the Commission to explain these different changes and, for the member states that so wished, to respond. However, according to one source, very few member spoke on the issue. Only Austria supported the amended proposal, according to another source. Consequently, the Commission called on member states that did not speak out due to on-going work in their respective countries to do so in writing before the end of the week. The Commission did not explain when it would be organising the next meeting or whether this meeting would be decisive. During a presentation of the dossier in June, the Commission, however, did indicate that it wanted to conclude the dossier “before the end of the year”. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)