Environmentalist groups said on Monday that Germany and the European Union had broken the rules when assessing the safety of the weed-killer glyphosate and that they would try to bring legal actions against the institutes involved.

 

Global 2000 and the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) said they had registered legal complaints with prosecutors in Vienna and Berlin, with lawsuits in France and Italy to follow. It was not clear how long it would take for the complaints to proceed, particularly as one body is pan-European and the other domestic, meaning they would potentially go through different courts.

 

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), one of the institutes named, denied the groups' allegations that it had improperly approved glyphosphate, which EU member states last week cleared for use for another five years after a heated debate over whether it causes cancer.

 

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