Articles

Canadian company TransCanada wants to sue the US for over US$15 billion in compensation - because President Obama rejected the contested Keystone XL oil pipeline. Another warning sign for extreme corporate rights in EU trade deals such as TTIP and CETA.

Regulatory cooperation in TTIP and Better Regulation, two processes for big business, which will weaken, delay or abolish standards.

Companies who make the pesticide glyphosate refuse to disclose key scientific evidence about its possible risks in the name of trade secrets protection. CEO appeals to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to disclose all the possible original elements of three key scientific studies it used in assessing glyphosate as “unlikely” to cause cancer to humans. We also call MEPs to reject the Trade Secrets Directive in the April 2016 plenary vote on the final text.

For the past two years, an unprecedented Europe-wide public controversy about a once-unknown element in international trade agreements has kept citizens, politicians and the media on their toes. It’s all been about the so-called investor-state dispute settlement system, in short, ISDS.

A Corporate Europe Observatory complaint to the lobby register secretariat is challenging the Commission to properly implement its own lobby transparency rules.

CEO turns the spotlight on another of the interest groups operating within the European Parliament.

The voice of the Dutch Government has been loud and clear in Brussels on the issue of cisgenic plants. The Dutch have waged a sustained campaign to have new GM techniques – and in particular cisgenesis – excluded from EU GMO regulations. Several Dutch ministries, the Dutch Parliament, the Dutch Permanent Representation in Brussels, and Dutch MEPs have energetically pursued this goal.

At least one developer of new GM crops – US-based Cibus – has attempted to bypass the European policy process by presenting policy makers with a fait accompli: decisions by individual Member States on the regulatory status of new techniques, as well as prematurely-launched trials of new GM crops.

The biotech industry is staging an audacious bid to have a whole new generation of genetic engineering techniques excluded from European regulations. The pending decision of the European Commission on the regulation of these so-called 'new GMOs' represents a climax point in the ongoing below-the-radar attack by industry on GM laws.