Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-05-21-Speech-3-463"
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"en.20080521.30.3-463"2
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"Mr President, a big thank you goes to Mr Sacconi for having achieved a good result from negotiations on this subject as rapporteur appointed by the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.
When the EU’s new legislation on chemicals, REACH, was being discussed, one of the greatest public concerns was that it would lead to more tests on animals. There was complete consensus among the political groups in the European Parliament on the legislation being established in such a way that everything would be done to minimise the number of animal tests, including the introduction of other, alternative test methods, as much as that was possible.
We were delighted when there was news from the European Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM) that a number of methods proposed as an alternative to animal experiments had been scientifically validated. We were therefore bewildered when the Commission was a long time giving its administrative approval to these same alternative test methods. In talks between the Committee on the Environment and the Commission it emerged that the Commission was going to wait for these tests to be approved by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as a whole, where just one country could torpedo the decision. The Committee on the Environment made it very clear to the Commission that such a delay was not acceptable and that we were prepared to exercise our right of veto under the new comitology procedure.
I am very pleased that the talks that followed between the Committee’s appointed rapporteur, Mr Sacconi, and the Commission led to a happy outcome and that the Commission is now committed to speeding up introduction of the alternative methods so as to reduce the number of tests on animals and the suffering that goes with them. This letter by the Commission, signed by Commissioners Dimas, Verheugen and Potočnik, has now also been incorporated into the decision proposal which Parliament is to adopt tomorrow.
It is very important that the EU is prepared to take decisions itself if the OECD delays the processes. Although we might encounter difficulties the end result will be a happy one."@en1
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