environmental protection

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Lawmakers will debate an amendment to include the country’s environmental commitments in Article 1 of France’s Constitution.

By Fabrice Fages

MPs in France have adopted an amendment to include a new paragraph in Article 1 of the French Constitution. The amendment reads:

“France acts towards the preservation of the environment and biological diversity, and against climate change.”

The Constitutional Law Commission of the National Assembly adopted the amendment on June 27, 2018, as part of France’s upcoming constitutional reform. A plenary session beginning on July 10, 2018 will debate the amendment.

The amendment represents an interesting shift from the previous constitutional reform proposal. The previous proposal addressed the protection of the environment and the fight against climate change via the modification of Article 34 of the Constitution.

By Michael Green and Paul Davies

A coalition of medical and environmental groups has called upon the European Commission (EC) to propose specific legislation that will address pollution, in particular, by active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). This political development highlights the complex debate currently taking place over how to identify and address the effects of APIs.

An API is the biologically active component of a pharmaceutical drug. Other ingredients, known as “excipients”, are the inert substances present in a pharmaceutical drug. For example, if a product is in syrup form, the excipient is the liquid being used.

The coalition has raised the concern that APIs make their way into groundwater, rivers, lakes, oceans, and even drinking water after being disposed, with potentially harmful effects on the environment and human health. APIs are specifically designed to trigger a biological process (unlike most other chemical pollutants). As such, if APIs are present at significant-enough levels, biological processes in humans and/or animals may be unintentionally activated with potentially harmful effects. For example, some evidence suggests that the environmental presence of antibiotics contributes to developing antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, and that synthetic hormones found in contraceptive pills cause infertility in fish. Moreover, the effects on humans of inadvertent long-term exposure to low levels of APIs in drinking water, particularly given the potential for the presence and interaction of multiple APIs, are relatively unknown.