Dear Commissioner Kyriakides,
We, the 83 undersigned civil society organisations, are writing to you to ask you to respond urgently to the unfulfilled requests from the European Parliament to improve the current pesticide authorisation system in Europe and ultimately ensure the high level of protection that EU law requires.
Five years ago, following citizens' concerns over the evaluation of glyphosate in Europe, the European Parliament set up a special committee (PEST) to investigate the authorisation procedure for all pesticides1 . After nine months of investigations, the PEST committee concluded that the primary objective of Regulation (EC) 1107/2009 to ensure a high level of protection for the environment, human and animal health, was not fully achieved as a result of major shortcomings in the pesticide authorisation system. To address this worrying situation, it provided more than 100 specific recommendations, which were largely endorsed by the European Parliament's Plenary in 20192 . All were meant to improve protection from pesticides and to restore citizens’ trust in the European institutions after glyphosate’s reapproval in December 2017.
