Ordinance on the Transboundary Movements
of Genetically Modified Organisms
(Cartagena Ordinance, CartO)

The FOEN is the co­ordin­at­ing body for all ques­tions re­lat­ing to the trans­bound­ary move­ments of ge­net­ic­ally mod­i­fied or­gan­isms. Its main du­ties in this con­text are as fol­lows:

it en­sures the li­ais­on with the Sec­ret­ari­at in ac­cord­ance with Art­icle 24 of the Con­ven­tion of 5 May 1992 on Bio­lo­gic­al Di­versity¹⁴;

b.¹⁵

it keeps a pub­lic re­gister of in­form­a­tion con­cern­ing no­ti­fic­a­tions and de­cisions that is not of a con­fid­en­tial nature in ac­cord­ance with Art­icle 6 para­graph 3; the con­fid­en­ti­al­ity of such in­form­a­tion is de­term­ined by Art­icle 34 RO¹⁶;

c.

it ad­vises ex­port­ers in cases when an im­port­ing coun­try does not re­spect the dead­lines re­quired by the Cart­agena Pro­tocol;

d.

it in­forms the Fed­er­al Of­fice of Pub­lic Health, the Fed­er­al Of­fice for Ag­ri­cul­ture, the Fed­er­al Veter­in­ary Of­fice and the Swiss Agency for Thera­peut­ic Products in ac­cord­ance with their re­spons­ib­il­it­ies as defined by the RO and the Con­tainO¹⁷ about trans­bound­ary move­ments as well as about any un­in­ten­ded trans­bound­ary move­ment of ge­net­ic­ally mod­i­fied or­gan­isms;

e.

it pub­lishes a peri­od­ic­al re­port on the trans­bound­ary move­ments of ge­net­ic­ally mod­i­fied or­gan­isms;

f.

it provides the forms needed for ac­com­pa­ny­ing doc­u­ment­a­tion in terms of Art­icle 4.