Greenpeace Netherlands lodged a complaint with the BoA after Keurhout’s Board of Experts (BoE) allowed 27 companies to operate in the Dutch market using MTCC certification, claiming that the scheme “by no means offers a guarantee of genuinely legal felling”.
MTCC said the BoA decision could give “the wrong impression” to the UK timber trade that the “MTCC scheme is not able to comply with the requirements of the Keurhout Protocol for the Validation of Claims of Legal Timber”.
The MTCC added that its scheme was recognised by a number of other governments as an assurance of legality, with the Dutch government even including it in its new public procurement guidelines.
Keurhout, a testing institution established in The Netherlands to verify international certification schemes, currently accepts companies using MTCC certification on a case-by-case basis but the MTCC has said that it hopes to see the scheme accepted as a whole in order to mitigate further misgivings that could arise from similar rulings.
