On June 17, 2026, the European Parliament adopted Regulation (EU) 2026/1388 on plants obtained by New Genomic Techniques (NGTs), which entered into force on July 16, 2026.
Negotiations for this new EU Regulation began after a CJEU decision in 2018, which ruled that plants obtained through targeted mutagenesis (such as the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique) were captured by the Regulation on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and all the strict requirements that entails, despite the fact that such NGT plants (cisgenesis and targeted mutagenesis) scientifically differ from traditional GMOs (transgenesis) in that they do not necessarily contain “foreign DNA”.