Agrégateur de flux

Case C-195/18 B.S. v Prokatura et al held mid-March, is great for the week-end. Serious stuff (excise duties and customs classification), but with a fun twist: does beer under excuse duties and customs regulation require the beverage to be made with malt as an ingredient, or does it also include mixtures of beer with non-alcoholic beverages, as long as it has fermented?  Put differently, may an alcoholic product obtained by fermentation of a wort produced from, inter alia, glucose syrup (yikes! yikes! and yikes again) and a small proportion of malt may be classified as ‘beer made from malt’?

The CJEU touches upon important issues: linguistic interpretation, WCO rules, etc. and finally decides that such a product can come under the ‘beer’ heading only on condition that its objective characteristics and properties correspond to those of beer (adding glucose syrup is not prohibited, other than of course under the only proper standard in this regard which is of course the Rheinheitsgebot (as amended)). In this regard, the court holds, account must be taken more particularly of the organoleptic (meaning ‘involving the use of the sense organs’) characteristics of the product in question, which is an exercise the referring court must undertake. No tasting sessions at Kirchberg therefore.

Have a good week-end.

Geert.

Préjudice d'anxiété lié à l'amiante

Non lieu à renvoi

I have of course posted regularly on the issues of unstunned slaughter, freedom of religious expression and animal welfare (search tag ‘shechita’ should pull out the relevant postings). The Belgian Constitutional court, to the expectations I assume of counsel in the case, yesterday referred to the CJEU for preliminary reference (cases 52 and 53/2019).

The subject of the litigation is the Flemish decree banning unstunned slaughter outright (for standing reasons the similar Walloon regime is no longer sub judice). The Belgian court requests the CJEU to clarify its judgment in C-426/16, on which I reported here,

Q1: does Regulation 1099/2009 allow Member States to introduce an outright ban; Q2 in the affirmative, is that compatible with the Charter’s right to religious expression; Q3 in the event of an affirmative answer to Q1: the elephant in the Regulation’s room which I flagged years back: is it not discriminatory to allow Member States to restrict religious slaughter, while simply exempting hunting, fishing and ‘sporting and cultural events’ from the Regulation altogether.

Readers will know my answer to these questions.

Geert.

Sans saisir la Cour de justice de l’Union européenne, le Conseil d’État valide le dispositif des joueurs issus des filières de formation mis en place par la Ligue nationale de rugby dans le championnat professionnel français.

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