EU lagging on animal experimentation controls

Just three countries have fully implemented the EU directive on the use of animals in research, a European Commission official has said.

Of the EU’s 28 member states, 25 have had problems implementing the animal use directive, Kestutis Sadauskas—an official in the Commission’s directorate-general for environment—told the European Parliament’s environment committee on 10 July.

The directive on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes was made EU law in 2010, and is up for review in November 2017. But Sadauskas said that transposing the directive into national legislation has been a cumbersome process, and that the slowest member state did so only in 2015.