FP6 can reduce vivisection, says parliament committee
The European Parliament's Environment committee has called for the European Commission's Sixth Framework Research Programme to allocate funding to the development of non-animal testing methods for cosmetics. The request came on 20 March, when the Environment committee unanimously adopted a report by German MEP Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, amending the Commission's seventh draft amendment to the cosmetics directive. The Commission proposes to ban the practice of tests on animals, but not the marketing of products which have already been tested on animals. The ban on testing would cover both finished products and ingredients. In 1993 it was decided that the marketing of cosmetics ingredients tested on animals would be prohibited from 1998. However, so far the ban has not come into effect. The main reasons cited by the Commission are the lack of alternative testing methods, with only three having been validated so far, and the problem of WTO (world trade organisation) compliance. The amendments adopted by the committee would preserve the ban on marketing. The committee is calling for the ban to come into force immediately for ingredients where other validated testing methods exist, and for all other ingredients, five years after the adoption of the directive. Ms Roth-Behrendt referred to the recently adopted US 'dog and cat fur act', which prohibits the production and importing of fur product from cats and dogs. The justification given for the act is that such products are detrimental to public moral standards and to animal protection. The same moral standards should be applied to testing on animals, she argued.