Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the classification, packaging and labelling of dangerous preparations (Recast)

On 1 April 1987 the Commission decided to instruct its staff that all acts should be codified after no more than ten amendments, stressing that this is a minimum requirement and that departments should endeavour to codify at even shorter intervals the texts for which they are responsible, to ensure that their provisions are clear and readily understandable.

The codification of Directive 1999/45/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 31 May 1999 concerning the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the classification, packaging and labelling of dangerous preparations has been initiated by the Commission. The new Directive was to have superseded the various acts incorporated in it.

In the meantime the Lisbon Treaty entered into force. Article 290 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) allows the legislator to delegate to the Commission the power to adopt non-legislative acts of general application to supplement or amend certain non-essential elements of a legislative act. Acts adopted by the Commission in this way are referred to in the terminology used by the TFEU as "delegated acts" (Article 290(3)).

Directive 1999/45/EC contains a provision with regard to which such a delegation of power would be opportune. It is therefore appropriate to transform the codification of Directive 1999/45/EC into a recast in order to incorporate the necessary amendments.

The recast proposal was drawn up on the basis of a preliminary consolidation, in 22 official languages, of Directive 1999/45/EC and the instruments amending it, carried out by the Publications Office of the European Union, by means of a data-processing system. Where the Articles have been given new numbers, the correlation between the old and the new numbers is shown in a table set out in Annex IX to the recast Directive.

EUR-Lex: COM(2012)008: Follow the progress of this document through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2012:008:FIN

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