The Court of Justice of the European Union rendered, Tuesday, February 7, a judgment specifying the status of certain genetically modified organizations with regard to European regulations on the subject.
By Stéphane Foucart
Rarely communication of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will have been so expected; Rarely has it also aroused such perplexity. European judges rendered, Tuesday, February 7, a judgment specifying the status of certain genetically modified organizations (GMOs) with regard to European regulations on the subject. Of great technicality, the text of the judgment had to be analyzed at length by the stakeholders (industrialists and associations), before these deliver their interpretation. One thing seems however acquired: it is a victory for the supporters of plant biotechnologies and a defeat for their opponents.
The CJEU opens up the possibility that certain organizations obtained by “random in vitro mutagenesis” can derogate from the requirements provided for by Directive 2001/18, which supervises the marketing and dissemination of GMOs on European territory. To understand, you have to go back to the sources of litigation. In 2015, the peasant confederation and several environmental protection organizations had seized the Council of State, protesting against the exemption from which the cultures obtained by mutagenèse benefit, not subject to the regulatory constraints of GMOs obtained by Transgenèse.
The mutagenèse amounts to mutating the genome of an organism to make it acquire certain characteristics, while transgenesis amounts to inserting a foreign gene into its genome.
Seizure of a question relating to Union law, the French high jurisdiction had, following the appeal formed by opponents of the biotechs, interviewed the CJEU to obtain from it its interpretation. In 2018, European judges had estimated that the organizations obtained by mutagenèse were not expressly subject to GMO regulations if the obtaining technique was those “traditionally used for various applications and whose security has been proven for a long time”, according to The terms of the court.
the court “capitulated”
In February 2020, the Council of State had therefore deduced that the organizations obtained by recent mutagenis techniques, after the 2001 directive, were to be regulated as GMOs. An important point: in France, a variety of tolerant rapeseed at the herbicide Imazamox, is cultivated after being obtained by mutagenèse in vitro. But the standoff did not stop at the decision of the French high jurisdiction. This was not followed by any measure of the authorities, the European Commission opposing any distinction between random mutagenis in vivo (traditional) and random mutagenis in vitro.
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