Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PHARMACEUTICAL companies will have to brace themselves for large increases to fees charged by the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products, after its standing committees on medicinal products issued formal amendments to its charging regime for approval by the European Commission.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE RECENTLY established database created by the European Clinical Trials Directive (EUDRACT) has come under fire from the European Science Foundation (ESF), which claims that its information is too tightly controlled to allow effective debate.

Although the EUDRACT database was set up to provide European Union (EU) Member States with information on the safety of medicines used in clinical trials, data security standards set by the European Commission prevent independent non-regulatory organisations from accessing it.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
CONCERN has been raised by the European Commission about a fall in European investment into biotechnology, which has matched the declining confidence of EU consumers in genetically modified products in general. Brussels’ first progress report on its action plan for European life sciences says that “urgent action” is needed to reverse this trend, especially as EU legislation has now been agreed regulating the development of GM technology and its potential adverse effects.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE SPANISH government has agreed to cooperate with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to fight breaches of copyright, especially in digital publishing. A joint memorandum of understanding committed both sides to cooperate over training, publicity campaigns and information exchanges.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank has drawn up plans to lend Italian encyclopaedia publisher Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani S.p.A. up to Euro 22 million to diversify and modernise the company’s product range, its use of technology and its sales channels.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
FINNISH lawyers are the most lightly regulated in the European Union (EU), according to the surprising results of a European Commission-funded survey designed to promote the need for liberalisation in Europe’s liberal professions. Oddly, Greece, not known for its adherence to EU rules, has the union’s most heavily regulated legal profession; under a statistical indices developed by the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Greece has a regulation burden of 9.5, while the laissez-faire Finns score a tiny 0.3.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
BRITISH High Court judge Sir Adrian Fulford was among 18 judges sworn in this week (11/03) to serve on the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC), which will sit at The Hague, the Netherlands.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A POLITICAL compromise has been struck that should clear the establishment of a new European Union (EU) ‘Community Patent’ which would be simpler and easier to acquire than via existing national and European Patent Office systems. Supporters of a simple EU patent are likely to be disappointed by the deal however, as it includes complicated translation rules; the European Commission, for instance, had originally proposed that Community patents should be written in one language.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission has flatly rejected a proposal by the “big four” accounting firms for a limit to be set on their liabilities. EU internal market commissioner Frits Bolkestein said that unlimited liability was a “quality driver” and Brussels had no intention of intervening to limit liability.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
WTO members were by the end of this month (March) due to agree binding liberalisation targets that member governments should hit in the agricultural section of the current Doha Development Round. Talks chairman Stuart Harbinson initially proposed an average duty reduction rate of 60 per cent, with a minimum cut of 45 per cent per tariff line.…