The bill brings Estonian legislation into line with the EU directive, which regulates the protection of animals used for scientific purposes. According to the European Commission, Estonia has transposed the directive incompletely and this has led to infringement proceedings. The amendments to the law proposed in the bill concern the conduct of animal experiments, the keeping of experimental animals and the obligations of the entrepreneur in this regard.
The explanatory letter states that the comments of the European Commission are mainly of a technical nature and deal with bottlenecks related to wording, sentence structure and the use of incomplete or incorrect expressions. The Commission considers that the wording of several national legal provisions is not precise enough to meet the provisions of the directive. It is also pointed out as a note that some of the concepts, features and elements specified in the directive are incompletely defined in the Estonian legislation, left undefined separately or there are no explicit substantive expressions supporting the purpose of the directive. The Commission notes that some provisions have not been transposed into Estonian law. The commission also considers that the administrative practices in accordance with the directive, which are described by the Estonian authorities in their response, are not sufficient for the transposition of the directive.