Background
Paraquat has been banned in Sweden since 1983 and is used in herbicides for olive, wine grape and hazelnut farming in the EU.
The European Commission’s Standing Committee on the Food Chain & Animal Health voted in October 2003 to include the herbicide in a list of authorised pesticides - despite a fierce lobbying campaign by environment, health groups and trade unions to ban it. And on 1 December 2003, the European Commission adopted Directive 2003/112 authorising the use of paraquat in the EU as an active plant protection substance.
In 2004, Sweden brought an action for annulment of Directive 2003/112 before the Court of First Instance.
The court case
In July 2007, the Court of First Instance annulled the Directive 2003/112 authorising the use of paraquat in the EU.
The main reasons put forward by the Court are :
the Commission did not fulfil the procedural requirements laid by Community law. Amongst others, the Commission did not make the required review of literature on potential links between paraquat and the Parkinson disease.
Directive 2003/112 fails to satisfy the requirement of protection of human health, which prohibits any exposure higher than the acceptable operator exposure level.
EU fails to ban dangerous pesticide ’paraquat’, October 2003.
