Behavioural infringements due to the human factor: how is the EU reacting?
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Behavioural infringements due to the human factor: how is the EU reacting? A focus on EU food safety law rules, food law tools and the Fipronil case Antonia Corini1
Published online: 3 December 2018 © ERA 2018
Abstract This article analyses the existing food safety law system. It also focuses on the horsemeat scandal and on the weaknesses of the system for dealing with food fraud. A description is provided of the new tools that have been proposed in order to deal with food fraud as well as of the new rules aimed at ensuring verification of compliance with the rules in order to prevent and/or to manage cases of food fraud. The article then concentrates on the Fipronil case: on the tools used in order to communicate and deal with the case and on the actions taken following it. The status quo and possible improvements of food law Enforcement will be discussed. Keywords Food safety · Food law tools · Food fraud cases
1 Food Law in the sense of ‘food safety’ Food law has evolved over the years into food safety law. This is the result both of the system designed by the EU Treaties and of the objectives sought to be achieved through ‘rules on food’. The EU Treaties provide rules aimed at ensuring the protection of human health as well as the smooth functioning of the internal market. The safeguarding of human health and the circulation of goods appear to be tightly linked. Article 6 TFEU lists the ‘protection and improvement of human health’ among the Presentation given on the occasion of the European Academy of Law (ERA) ‘Annual Conference on EU Law in the Food Sector’, Brussels, 17–18 May 2018.
B A. Corini
[email protected]
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Ph.D. (Doctor Europaeus) on the Agro-Food System, Doctoral School on the Agro-Food System, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Via Emilia Parmense, 84, 29122 Piacenza, Italy
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A. Corini
objectives which the EU pursues in order to support, coordinate or supplement the actions of the Member States. In that light, Article 168 TFEU establishes competence on the part of the EU to ‘complement’ national policies directed at ensuring a high level of human health protection. As for the functioning of the internal market, Article 114 TFEU provides for the adoption, on the part of the EU, of measures for the approximation of Member States’ rules in the framework of the establishment and functioning of the internal market (Article 114(1)). Article 114(3) TFEU stipulates that the Commission in its proposals ‘concerning health, safety, environmental protection and consumer protection, will take as a base a high level of protection, taking account in particular of any new development based on scientific facts’. In the light of these provisions and bearing in mind Article 169 TFEU, which provides a legal basis for the adoption of rules on consumer protection, it can be asserted that EU primary law takes into consideration the protection of the economic interests of consumers. This statement appears to have less force, however, when one analyses food law—contrary to what one might expect of the
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