Following on from CAN Europe and five other NGOs (see EUROPE 13441/19), three French associations also appealed to the EU General Court at the beginning of August to challenge the EU’s 10-year re-authorisation of glyphosate.
Criigen (Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering), the Association des maires antipesticides and Agir pour l’environnement are represented by lawyer Corinne Lepage, former French Minister for the Environment (1995-1997) and Member of the European Parliament (2009-2014).
Christophe Clergeau (S&D, French) felt that the risk assessment that led to the European Commission’s re-authorisation of glyphosate (see EUROPE 13294/1) was “incomplete”, and gave his support to this initiative in a post on the social network X on Monday 9 September.
Interviewed by Agence Europe on Wednesday 11 September, the French MEP confirmed that, in his opinion, “the decision deserves to be annulled, because the risk assessment carried out does not comply with the legislation”. In particular, he points to “the inadequacy of the data collected” and the failure to take account of “cocktail effects”.
In addition to legal recourse, Christophe Clergeau points out that new scientific data can change legislation or, at the very least, reopen the debate. This could be the case with a study on leukaemia by the Ramazzini Institute. This study will be incorporated into the ECHA and EFSA corpus if its peer review proves positive. In this case, the two scientific agencies will have to establish whether the study is “likely to change the assessment of the risk or not”, explained Christophe Clergeau. (Original version in French by Florent Servia)