Slovakia to Challenge EU Deregulation of Gene Editing in Court

September 2, 2026 by Beyond GM

Image: Bigstock

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.

Longstanding Slovak opposition

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.

What the EU regulation does

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.

The UK connection

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.

What happens next

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.

It also ensures that the two-year implementation period will unfold under a new layer of legal uncertainty – on both sides of the Channel.

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