Landmark EU ruling on bovine products

The European Court of Justice has this week annulled the Commission's decision to end the ban on bovine products from Portugal, following a French-led legal challenge.

The original Commission ruling, which was introduced in 1998 to combat BSE, prohibited Portugal from exporting live bovine animals, beef and veal, and products obtained from those animals to other Member States or to third countries.

Following on from this, the Commission laid down the conditions for lifting the ban on 18 April 2001, and has since carried out numerous inspections. It also initiated a date-based export scheme (DBES) with a view to permitting the export of products from animals born after a given date.

However, France decided to bring an action before the Court of Justice of the European Communities because it questioned the Commission's ability to assert that the conditions laid down had been met.

For the ruling, the court started from the principle that a high level of human health protection must be ensured in the definition and implementation of all Community policies and activities. In the light of those considerations, it identified inspections that the Commission should have carried out in accordance with its decision on 18 April 2001.

The checks that the Commission should have carried out included more specific inspections and more general inspections to verify the implementation of official controls. The court also ruled that the Commission should have investigated the incidence of the disease to verify the enforcement of national measures and to conduct a risk assessment.

The court pointed out that even though the DBES is based on the individual status of eligible animals, compliance with the prohibition on meat meal, bone meal and meat-and-bone meal and the proper operation of the animal identification and traceability systems are essential to ensuring the safety required of that scheme.

Therefore, before setting the date for lifting the ban, the Commission should not only have carried out the inspections relating to the DBES, but it should also have carried out the more general inspections.

As a result, the ECJ​ decided to annul the Commission decision of 25 July 2001, which would have ended the ban on Portuguese bovine products.