REACH Substance Evaluation – First impressions and legal issues

Implementing provisions of the REACH Regulation has been a full-time job for both authorities and registrants for the last few years. The focus of activities so far has been the registration of substances and the subsequent compliance check of registration dossiers, with applications for authorization slowly coming to the fore in 2013. Likewise, registrants have, until now, not been concerned overmuch with the regulatory mechanism of substance evaluation under REACH. Now, during the past months, the first final decisions concerning substance evaluation were taken by the competent authorities. Some of these decisions as well as the entire administrative process of substance evaluation have raised some legal issues and may pose problems for the concerned registrants. This paper aims to identify some of these issues and to analyse the legal framework associated with substance evaluation.