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Critical observations on the French Conseil d’État ruling on plant mutagenesis

Nature Plants volume 6, pages 1392–1393 (2020)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 11 January 2021

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To the Editor — On 20 February this year, the French Council of State (Conseil d’État (CdE)) dropped a bomb that is sending shock waves throughout the French farming community, the European seed sector and the European Union (EU) internal market1. The CdE judgement was as follows: that plants obtained by randomly induced in vitro mutagenesis must comply with the regulatory provisions for genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The judgement was a follow-up of the case C-528/16 before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), where the court ruled that only organisms obtained by techniques or methods of mutagenesis which have conventionally been used in a number of applications and have a long safety record are excluded from the scope of Directive 2001/18/EC. CJEU also ruled that the EU member states are at liberty to nationally subject these organisms to the obligations of the same directive as long as it is not in conflict with EU law (such as the rules on the free movement of goods)2.

Implementing the CdE judgement, the French government issued a draft decree notification to the European Commission (EC) on 6 May, proposing an amendment of the French Environmental Code and the list of GM techniques traditionally used, in order to specify the regulatory status of plants derived from in vitro random mutagenesis3. If this decree were to be adopted, many crop varieties would be removed from the national variety list in France, most notably rapeseed varieties that contain the Clearfield system for herbicide tolerance, and this could potentially cause disruption of the EU internal market. Given the far-reaching consequences, we find it necessary to take a closer look at the reasoning behind the decision.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Breeding, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, Sweden

    Dennis Eriksson & Tomasz Zimny

  2. Institute of Law Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland

    Tomasz Zimny

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  1. Dennis Eriksson
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  2. Tomasz Zimny
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Both authors contributed equally to this Correspondence.

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Correspondence to Dennis Eriksson.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Plants thanks Fabien Nogué and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Eriksson, D., Zimny, T. Critical observations on the French Conseil d’État ruling on plant mutagenesis. Nat. Plants 6, 1392–1393 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-00819-4

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