The EU Court of Justice, granting the request of Greenpeace and the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe, decided that safety tests conducted by chemical companies to evaluate the hazards of pesticides must be made public. For the Court, these studies fall within the "information on emissions into the environment", as defined under the Aarhus Convention and the EU regulations transposing this Convention. The studies cannot be kept secret in order to protect commercial interests anymore, but have to be made public automatically. According to a representative of PAN Europe, the fact that the assessment tests on the safety of the substances tested are carried out by the same companies that produce them, constitutes an obvious conflict of interest. He adds that the publication of the full results will be used to check whether the partial data that companies have originally provided to the authorities correspond to what actually emerged from the studies.
