Published 5 August 2026
The Court of Justice of the EU has ruled that a Member State cannot impose a general, systematic notification obligation on every consignment of food supplements arriving from another Member State. The judgment strikes at the heart of the Czech Republic’s import control system, and puts every comparable national regime on notice.
The case
Since 2015, Czech Decree No 172/2015 has required any recipient of food supplements (and certain other foodstuffs) arriving from another Member State or a third country to notify the Czech Agriculture and Food Inspection Authority (SZPI) at least 24 hours before the goods reached their destination. The notification had to specify the product type and quantity, its origin, the recipient, and the expected arrival date, so that SZPI could plan risk-based official controls.
The Czech company PRAGON s.r.o. was checked by SZPI on 7 June 2021 and its control was challenged. It lost before the Prague City Court, and appealed on a point of law to the Nejvyšší správní soud (Supreme Administrative Court), which referred the matter to Luxembourg. The referring court asked, in substance, whether Article 34 TFEU (read with Article 36 TFEU) and Article 9(7) of Regulation (EU) 2017/625 preclude a national rule imposing this kind of blanket advance-notification duty.
The ruling
In its judgment of 21 May 2026 in Case C‑626/24, the Court held that Article 9(7) of Regulation 2017/625 exhaustively harmonises the conditions under which Member States may require operators to notify the arrival of consignments for official-controls purposes. Under that provision, such a notification duty is permissible only where it is strictly necessary for the effective organisation of official controls, in light of the imperatives of protecting human health and consumers.
A general obligation applied indiscriminately to every intra-EU consignment, regardless of actual risk, does not meet that threshold. The Czech system, treating all incoming supplements as presumptively requiring advance notice, goes beyond what Article 9(7) allows.
What it does — and does not — change
The judgment removes a specific, consignment-level import notification duty in the Czech Republic, and any comparable “notify-on-arrival” regime elsewhere in the EU is now exposed to the same challenge. It does not touch the separate question of market-placement notification under Article 10 of Directive 2002/46/EC — the mechanism most Member States still use to register a food supplement before it is placed on their national market for the first time. That patchwork of 27 divergent national procedures remains untouched by Pragon, and is arguably the bigger obstacle to a genuine EU single market for food supplements.
For operators shipping supplements cross-border within the EU, Pragon is a useful precedent: national authorities must now show that any consignment-notification duty is targeted and risk-based, not a blanket administrative burden dressed up as a control measure.
References
- Judgment of the Court (Third Chamber), 21 May 2026, PRAGON s.r.o. v Státní zemědělská a potravinářská inspekce, Inspektorát v Praze, Case C‑626/24, ECLI:EU:C:2026:414: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62024CJ0626
- Curia case overview, C‑626/24: https://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-626/24
- Regulation (EU) 2017/625 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2017, Article 9(7): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32017R0625
- Directive 2002/46/EC on food supplements, Article 10: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32002L0046
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