The appointment of Mr Várhelyi as holder of the portfolio of Health and Animal Welfare was agreed as part of an arrangement between Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, and influential MEPs in the European Parliament on Wednesday. It is the first time that animal welfare has featured in the title of one of the 27 Commissioners’ roles, who are each given a specific area of responsibility in working with the President to lead the European Commission for the next five years.

During Varhelyi’s original hearing, a number of MEPs raised the question of testing on animals, urging the Commissioner-designate to make the issue a priority, and to support the production of alternatives. When pressed to show support for the importance of non-animal methods, Várhelyi stated: “Yes, I fully agree”. He later outlined hopes to reduce the reliance on animal testing and speed up the clinical trials process through embracing new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.

Our Head of Public Affairs, Dylan Underhill, said: “We hope that this agreement will be a positive step in Europe’s progress towards a comprehensive phase-out of animal testing. This new role should allow the Commission to show political leadership on animal welfare and recognise that the issue is of the utmost importance to the people of the European Union.

“We want to see the Commission's work towards a phase-out, including through its Roadmap to end animal testing for chemical safety assessment, progress in a positive and productive direction. We look forward to being both a supportive and challenging voice to ensure that this new role delivers crucial goals that will ultimately bring about an end to the use of animals in science across the EU. The comments by the Commissioner-designate in support of promoting alternative technologies and using innovations to drive down the number of animal tests is a small but positive sign. Now we will be looking for concrete actions to drive this mission across the EU."

The Commission last year promised to develop a roadmap to phase-out animal testing for chemical safety assessments, in response to the 2020 European Citizens’ Initiative, ‘Save Cruelty Free Cosmetics – Commit to a Europe Without Animal Testing’, which was signed by over 1.2 million EU citizens.

Earlier in the year Cruelty Free Europe worked closely with a group of animal protection NGOs to bring together the Commission and key stakeholders from across the European Union, as a critical step towards shaping the objectives and outcomes of that roadmap.

Cruelty Free Europe says that a dedicated Commissioner with responsibility for Animal Welfare, including driving the phase-out of testing on animals as a shared objective throughout the EU, could help to build on this work by supporting policy coherence, and bring us closer to realising the ultimate objective of ending all animal testing.

Statistics published in July by the European Commission show that there were 9.34 million tests on animals in the EU and Norway in 2022. This is an 8% decrease from 2021 to 2022, but a rise of 7% since 2020. In addition to these 9.34 million uses of animals, a further 9.6 million were intentionally bred and killed in laboratories, without being used in experiments, in 2022 – this brings the total uses of animals in that year to 18.9 million.