The European Court of Justice ruled Thursday that France's refusal to lift its ban on British beef, imposed amid fears of madcow disease, was illegal, but stopped short of imposing any immediate fine.
The court, which rules on cases involving EU treaties, generally imposes a fine as the usual sanction when it rules against a nation.
Instead, it gave France "a reasonable delay" to lift the beef ban, a court spokeswoman said without giving any specific dates.
Britain welcomed the ruling, and the leader of its farmers' union urged severe punitive fines if Paris failed to lift the embargo.
Benn Gill, the leader of the National Farmers' Union said that if France refused to lift the ban, it would have to decide if it still wanted to be in the EU.
"This just has got to stop," he told BBC radio in an immediate reaction after hearing the Luxembourg verdict.
"They have got to decide if they are in Europe."
France was the only EU member state not to accept a European Commission decision in August 1999 to lift a European ban on British beef, claiming its scientists were not fully convinced that British beef was safe.
France was Britain's biggest market for exported beef prior to the ban.
A French parliamentary commission placed a large part of the blame for the arrival of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in France on Britain, which it said continued to export meat and bone meal (MBM) to continental Europe even after it had been identified in 1988 as the probable cause for BSE and banned for domestic consumption.
BSE, and its human form, variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, are fatal brain wasting illnesses, marked by sponge-like holes appearing in the brain.
French scientists argued that when the ban was lifted by the European Union, the possibility of transmission by other than the two known routes -- namely feed and maternal transmission -- could not be ruled out.
Lawyers for the the French government said in June when the case was heard that there had been 101 cases in Britain of variant Creutzfeldt Jakob disease, compared with only three cases in France at that time.
The European Commission argued that France had to take into account the opinions of other European scientists who said that strict controls on beef processing meant that the ban could now be lifted.
The European Union placed a ban on exports of British beef in 1996, plunging the industry into a crisis from which it had not fully recovered before being hit again this year by outbreaks of foot and mouth disease – Luxembourg (AFP)
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