Protection of animals: European Convention on vertebrates used for experimental purposes

The European Parliament approved the proposal for a decision with the following modifications: - contrary to the proposal put forward by the Council, Parliament took the view that the Community should not use the reserve provided for under Article 34 of the Convention and believed that the EU should effectively provide statistical data every 2 years in accordance with Article 28 of the Convention. After a transition period of 6 years (and therefore not beyond the year 2000) the Community would be bound by this obligation on an annual basis (and not every 3 years as presently provided for by the current EU Directive). Parliament justified this option in the recitals to the proposal by maintaining that the Community should make greater efforts to develop alternative methods to animal testing and that in this regard the exchange of data in this area should be maintained as far as possible in order that certain experiments were not repeated unnecessarily. In the same context Parliament stressed that although the action programme to promote the environment sought to reduce animal experimentation by 50% between then and the year 2000, this objective should not prevent more ambitious targets from being specified and pursued; - at the same time Parliament called on all EU Member States to make arrangements to ensure that all instruments needed for the approval of the Convention were in place by 01.01.2000 at the latest. �