Food Supplements: European Court To Hear Anti-Prohibition Case In January
The European Court of Justice has set 25 January 2005 as the date for hearing a case challenging the new European Directive on Food Supplements. The EU supplement law's prohibition clause will go into effect in July 2005, taking off the market many supplements consumers are now buying, unless the directive is overturned or substantially modified. The case was referred to the EU court by judge Richards of the London High Court on 30 January this year. Mr. Justice Richards heard two cases in January. Both argued that the British law putting the food supplements directive into effect was going to hurt both producers and consumers. Since national courts cannot change what has been decided in Brussels, judge Richards asked the European Court for help in making a decision.
The directive has been hotly contested by consumers, both before and during its passage through the EU legislative channels and afterwards, but the EU's bureaucracy maintains that new rules are necessary to protect consumer health and that "no products will be removed from the market". One would think that one or both of these assertions must be untrue, since if consumers were in need of protection, there should logically also be products that need removal from the market. Conversely, if no products are scheduled for removal, why make a law "to protect consumers"?
. . .
Suffocated by Administrative Red Tape
The assurances of the EU Commission that no products will be removed from the market are contrary to widespread expectations - the directive's dispositions will sharply limit types of ingredients which may be used as vitamin and mineral sources, as well as mandating strict dosage limits. The Commission says producers can file dossiers with the European Food Safety Authority to add substances to the "allowed" list.. The hitch: data requirements are similar to those of a pharmaceutical medicines registration, with the exception only of clinical trials proving the supplement to be curative. Since supplements can not make claims of cure, waiving that requirement is really not a big concession.
Some of the supplement producers say that such dossiers put a heavy burden on them, costing substantial amounts of money for products that cannot be patent protected like pharmaceutical medicines. They add that the dossiers are unnecessary as the safety of supplements is quite obvious from years of daily use by millions of consumers.
The UK Food Standards Agency's Dr. Clair Baynton after attending a meeting with officials from the European Food Safety Authority and the European Commission said last week in a written note to interested parties and associations, that dossiers will have to be submitted and that the the Commission "did not favour changes to the time scales in the directive".
With the new regime mandated by the directive, food supplements are in effect being subjected to an expensive, highly duplicative, quasi-medical regime of prior ingredient approval, regardless of their historically proven safety. Never mind that what they contain are vital nutrients and never mind that without a sufficient supply of those nutrients, our bodies will get sick and die. Ironically, while supplements save lives, they are now to follow laws designed for medicines, while hundreds of thousands of deaths every year are due to consumption of just such officially approved medicines, rather than the "unregulated" supplements.
Dr. Robert Verkerk, director of the Alliance for Natural Health, one of the groups involved in the legal action, says he is "delighted that an early hearing date has now been set and hopeful that the European Court in Luxembourg will invalidate the quite unnecessary ban on the wide range of perfectly safe natural, food-derived ingredients which comprise most of the advanced food supplements."
The early date set for the hearing will assure that a decision by the EU court does not come "after the fact", meaning after consumers have been left with little choice of how to stay healthy using supplements. There seems to be reason for optimism, considering that in April this year, the same court condemned Germany for having illegally limited dosages of supplements to three times the RDA across the board. Such limits are legal only if evaluated case by case and if there are reasons to believe that a product may cause adverse effects, according to the court.
Dossier requirements and administrative red tape for supplements - ironically promoted as necessary for "consumer protection" by medical authorities and makers of medicines which themselves have been proven to be highly dangerous - are set to suffocate supplements as a health choice unless the EU judges make a wise decision this coming month of January.
See also:
Why organized medicine wants to outlaw nutrition and turn healers into criminals
How about some truth for a change about the Food Supplements Directive in the European Union? The proponents of this directive say that it's about protecting patients from all these dangerous vitamins, minerals, supplements, plant extracts and antioxidants that are so dangerous for people. They say, "We're going to keep you safe!"
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Thursday December 9 2004
updated on Thursday December 16 2010URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2004/12/09/food_supplements_european_court_to_hear_antiprohibition_case_in_january.htm
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