ABSTRACT
Reg. The 28 countries of the European Union1 are covered by the European Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientic purposes.2 The European Union body responsible for the development and implementation of the Directive is the Directorate-General Environment of the European Commission. As mandated in the Directive (Art. 61,1), Member States had to adopt and publish by Nov. 10, 2012, the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with this Directive, and apply those provisions from January 1, 2013 (this process is called the transposition of the Directive). Although not all Member States complied with that deadline, they currently should have their own piece of legislation transposing the Directive. To help level the playing eld across the European Union (which is one of the objectives of the Directive), Member States cannot apply stricter measures than those in the Directive unless they were already in force on November 9, 2010 (Art. 2,1). If they had stricter national measures before that date, the measures were aimed at ensuring more extensive protection of animals falling within the scope of this Directive, and were communicated to the European Commission before January 1, 2013, they could be maintained. In addition to the transposition at national level, there may be countries with a further transposition of the national law at the regional level.
