The Forum holds its open sessions once a year back-to-back with the last Forum meeting of the year. All ECHA Accredited Stakeholders (ASO) are invited to participate.

A call for interest and request to submit proposals for presentations is launched at the end of the summer each year.

The ASOs are invited to bring of issues they wish to highlight and discuss with the Forum.

The discussions are seen as beneficial for both sides as they served to clarify, in general terms, the NEA approaches and existing activities in Member States.

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2014
• 2013

The Joint Forum-BPRS Open session took place on 9 November 2022 as a virtual meeting.

The open session was attended by 32 representatives from 24 accredited stakeholder organisations (ASOs) and nine representatives from four countries participating in the instrument for pre-accession (IPA) assistance programme.

There were two main topics that stakeholders focused on: one on the future of the Forum and the potential strengthening of the Forum’s role in light of the upcoming Chemical Strategy for Sustainability and REACH review; and on the enforcement of REACH restrictions including two presentations on specific analytical methods. An additional topic on in-situ generating Ozone devices was also presented and an update on an action point from last year’s Open session on the same topic was given by the BPRS Chair.

The participants were also briefed about the results of the Forum enforcement projects finalised in 2022, namely the REF-9 project on Authorisation and the pilot project on Recovered substances exempted from REACH registration. Additionally, the participants received a summary of the workshop that was held in the Spring of 2022, where the results and recommendations of the project REF-8 on online sales was discussed with the interested Stakeholders.

Forum and BPRS invited the ASOs to submit project proposals by 14 April 2023 so they can be part of the 2023 cycle for the selection of enforcement projects (link for the template at the end of the page).