Bijdrage mili­eu­com­missie over "één stof, één beoor­deling” - hervorming voor de beoor­deling van chemische stoffen

Anja Hazekamp (PvdD):

For the LEFT, I will be the shadow on this package of proposals, so I will take the floor in that capacity now.

I want to thank the Commission for putting forward this package, which is an essential part in the revamping of our chemical legislation. With this One substance One Assessment approach, we’re making good steps to secure faster evaluations and faster restrictions of hazardous chemicals. Importantly, it should lead to a reduction of animal testing, and I do hope that the Commission can comment on this some more. And it should improve transparency and information on all these hazardous chemicals for the public and independent scientists, as we will now have one easy to find the chemicals platform.

However, I was very disappointed that this platform leaves all the very extensive confidentiality clauses on data unchanged, by simply referring to the confidentiality regimes of the basic legislation under which the data was generated. That is utterly inadequate and will hamper all the objectives the proposal is setting out to achieve. As was also indicated by stakeholders from academics and civil society, scientific experts from academia need to have access to more data in order to ensure that the public is protected sufficiently from any harm caused by chemicals. Currently, the main legal obstacles are confidential business information and lack of access to full study reports. They supported the suggestion to harmonise transparency rules across the chemicals regulatory framework. And yet the Commission fails to deliver! Even though in the recent debate with Dr Url from the EFSA, the EP representative was perfectly clear in expressing her worry about the enormous increase in the requests for confidential treatment by the industry, which not only deprives us from essential data but also takes up a lot of capacity from the Authority and Agency. This is something we should definitely amend when we will set our position on the proposals here in the European Parliament. I would like to hear from the Commission why they chose to give industry all these possibilities to keep essential data a secret.

Thank you in advance for your answers.