September 2, 2026 by Beyond GM
Update: Since this story was first published two more cases have been brought against the new EU NGT Regulations. See updates below.
Slovakia says it will challenge the European Union’s new law deregulating most gene-edited plants, Prime Minister Robert Fico announced today, taking concerns about precaution, transparency and consumer choice to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s highest court.
The announcement was reported by Slovak news outlet Teraz.sk and news agency TASR after a government meeting in Nitra. Fico said the regulation had provoked widespread protest because it effectively declared that there was nothing to worry about, despite a lack of evidence about what these genetically engineered plants could do to people.
Slovakia has not yet published its legal grounds or confirmed that papers have been filed. The announcement does not itself suspend the law, but it opens a significant new front in the struggle over Europe’s biggest change to GMO regulation in a generation.
Opposition within Slovakia has been unusually broad and sustained. It voted against the new proposed regulation in the Council in April, alongside Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia. In its formal statement, Slovakia objected specifically that gene-edited plants in the new EU regulatory category ‘NGT1’ and their products would not be labelled throughout the production chain, limiting consumers’ right to make an informed choice.
These concerns were repeatedly raised during the EU legislative process. Opposing governments warned that the final law leaves gaps around risk assessment, traceability, coexistence, organic production, patents and the ability of Member States to protect their own farming and food systems.
In July, campaigners delivered an appeal signed by 300 scientists and organisations from across the EU to Agriculture Minister Richard Takáč and Prime Minister Robert Fico, calling on the government to challenge the regulation (Beyond GM was amongst the signatories). The appeal drew on legal opinions arguing that the new regime conflicts with the precautionary principle, the Cartagena Protocol, consumer information rights and the European Court’s landmark 2018 ruling that organisms produced using new mutagenesis techniques are GMOs under EU law.
The new EU Regulation covers plants produced by targeted mutagenesis – including gene-editing tools such as CRISPR – and cisgenesis, together with their food and feed. It divides these genetically modified plants into two categories.
NGT1 plants that meet the law’s genetic ‘equivalence’ criteria will, after a verification procedure, be treated as if they were conventionally bred. They will not require a case-by-case GMO risk assessment or authorisation, and the resulting food and feed will not be labelled or traceable as GMOs. Seeds and other reproductive material must be marked NGT1, and details will appear in public databases and variety catalogues.
Plants engineered for herbicide tolerance or to produce a known insecticidal substance cannot be classified as NGT1. These fall into the NGT2 category, alongside plants with more complex changes, and remain subject to GMO-style risk assessment, authorisation, traceability and labelling, albeit with some adapted requirements.
All NGT plants remain prohibited in EU organic production. Yet NGT1 products will not be identified beyond the seed stage. Organic and non-GM operators are instead expected to rely on seed labels, databases and variety catalogues – a paper-thin solution for complex food, feed and farming supply chains. Patents are not prohibited either; the law relies largely on disclosure, monitoring and a voluntary code of conduct to address their effects on farmers and breeders. The European Commission’s summary of the new regime confirms these arrangements.
The EU regulation entered into force on 16 July 2026 but will not apply until 17 July 2028. Until then, targeted-mutagenesis and cisgenic plants, food and feed remain under existing EU GMO law.
England has its own deregulation under the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 and the 2025 Regulations. Both systems rest on the contested claim that specified engineered genetic changes ‘could have occurred naturally’ or through traditional breeding. But England’s regime is looser still: it has no equivalent seed label, no exclusion for herbicide-tolerant or insecticidal traits, no limit on the number of changes that can be made in a single organism and no patent-information requirement.
England’s regulations are already the subject of a successful legal challenge. On 4 June, the High Court ruled in favour of a judicial review led by Beyond GM, finding that the minister had been wrongly advised that the 2023 Act gave him no power to require labelling and traceability. The Court found that the decision-making based on that advice was unlawful. Negotiations for remedy and lawful reconsideration are ongoing.
The Slovak and English cases arise under different legal systems, but they expose the same incoherence and regulatory fictions: gene-edited crops are treated as conventional – except where they are not.
For instance, gene edited processes and products are the same as “traditional” and “natural” except when developers wish to patent them and they become made-made, industrial and and products of human invention.
Under organic law, gene editing remains a form of genetic modification and is prohibited throughout global organic supply chains. Yet deregulation removes the risk assessment, traceability and labelling that organic operators need to meet those legal obligations. Conventional producers making certified non-GM claims face similar difficulties.
At the end of the supply chain, consumers are left without the information needed to make an informed choice.
Now, with England’s regulations already under reconsideration, the EU facing a legal challenge, with neither regime fully operational and the possibility of UK-EU realignment, the future of gene-editing deregulation on both sides of the Channel is far from settled.
Slovakia must now progress Fico’s announcement into a filed action and specify the provisions it wants annulled. Any application can expect to face both corporate and institutional push-back. Nevertheless, for opponents of NGT deregulation, the announcement is significant because it moves concerns about precaution, consumer information and international obligations from policy and regulatory backwaters into the EU’s highest court.
Not long after Slovakia filed its case, a German coalition filed a further challenge the EU NGT Regulations with the General Court of the European Union in Luxembourg. The 12 claimants represent a broad coalition from across the German food production and value chain including seed producers, food manufacturers, farming associations, and advocacy groups who are alleging that their brand value, certification, and contractual obligations, are all threatened by the new rules, which jeopardise their economic activities and existence. The challenge is grounded in alleged violations of primary EU law, including the precautionary principle, consumer protection, freedom to conduct a business, and property rights, as well as international agreements like the Aarhus Convention, which guarantees access to justice in environmental matters.
As with the UK case,the German initiative highlights that the unique and existential threat to these organisations posed by the NGT regulations provides the necessary legal grounds for challenge. More information on the German case can be found here. It is in German but easily translatable online.
In addition to these two cases, a coalition comprising ALU (Associazione Libera-mente Umani) a human rights association, along with the European Consumers group and others, has filed a claim with the General Court. Less is known about this challenge. However, an early letter to the EU Commission, suggests its arguments largely overlap with the German case, but place additional emphasis on ecological complexity, health protection and the handling of uncertainty
What all this means is that the two-year implementation period for the new regulations will now be unfolding under a new layer of serious legal uncertainty – on both sides of the Channel.
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