The Regional Administrative Court (TAR) of Lazio, an Italian region, overturned the Medicinal Plants Decree that limited hemp production to seeds and fibers. This decision authorizes the effective use of the entire hemp plant in Italy.
“The national legislation of each Member State may limit the use of parts of the plant only if such limitation is strictly necessary to protect the right to public health” can be read in the decision.
Lawyer Giacomo Bulleri, who was defending the case, commented for CanapaIndustriale: “In other words, in cases like the one in question, it is necessary for the administration to provide an adequate explanation of the priority requirements for the protection of health and precaution, by providing scientific data demonstrating the existence of a risk arising from the cultivation of hemp plants in their entirety (i.e. seeds, seed derivatives, leaves and the inflorescences from which the resin has been extracted).
Now that the decree has been canceled, the competent ministries will have to rework the text. In the meantime, the ban on hemp being sold in herbal medicine or potentially being registered as a smoking product is technically outdated.
Protective measures would nevertheless be necessary to protect the sector and operate completely legally.
“The satisfaction was to make a court understand for the first time what the hemp regulatory system is that the TAR has shown to have seized with a sentence substantially in line with that of the French Council of State”, underlines Bulleri at Canapaindustriale.
The TAR specifically cited both the recent decision of the French Council of State, which effectively legalized the trade in CBD and weed light in France, and the judgment of the European Court of Justice which stressed that legal CBD products from a Member State must be able to circulate freely throughout Europe.
Regarding the fact that hemp can be used in its entirety, he writes that: “It is not possible to infer any distinction between the parts of the hemp plant which are freely cultivated, according to the law cited not. 242/2016, which can be used for the purposes established by the law itself. Indeed, the sectoral discipline of international and Community origin specifies that the discretionary criterion for establishing the free cultivation of hemp lies in the type of plant, considered as a whole”.
Government departments in an attempt to restrict the use of hemp flowers had also invoked the “precautionary principle” without however providing evidence to support the scientific uncertainty regarding the safety of hemp leaves and flowers.
