Germany's brief ban on the sale of MON810 seed in 2007 over an unsufficient monitoring plan, and the current ban on sale and cultivation has lead to some quite interesting official papers.
The notification from 2007 details a number of issues that should be considered in a monitoring plan, and the new notification from 2009 gives several pages of what the German authorities consider as new scientific evidence that makes it necessary to act according to the Precautionary Principle and evoke the German and EU saufguard clauses.
The paper refers to Bt expostion, ecotoxicological effects on moths and butterflies (lepidoptera), beetles (coleoptera), soil and water organisms, the specific issues of endangered species or species in nature protection areas. The BVL, the competent authority also had to conclude that the cultivation of MON810 was so "marginal" in Germany (on an expected acreage of 2700 ha), that the ban would not be financial problem for Monsanto.
A stark contrast to this paper however is Monsanto's monitoring report for the growing season 2008. It's not only a far cry from the detailed list of issues that the BVL was forced to consider relevant in May 2007, it doesn't even give information of whether any of the data taken from other environmental monitoring projects had any geographical relation to the MON810 fields.

Middle of April is the deadline: that's when the maize will be sown in Germany, and according to the public register about 3700 hectare will be sown with the GM maize MON810. And the call to agricultural minister Aigner to stop the cultivation is getting louder and louder, especially after the EU environmental ministers - and among them the German minister Gabriel - confirmed the Austrian and Hungarian ban of MON810 in 2 March 2009.
Campact, an environmental NGO, has been following Aigner around for days now to raise the issue. They also got a petition online, but unfortunately that only works for Germany addresses. After Aigner replied at some stage, asking for help in bringing the scientific evidence about MON810, Campact, BUND and BÖWL published another report why it is possible and necessary to stop its cultivation.
Meanwhile Monsanto has finally submitted its MON810 monitoring report for 2008: 31 pages in English that apparently only summarize already existing reports, but doesn't give any information that has anything to do with the actual fields on which MON810 was grown in 2008.

Friends of the Earth published their 2009 copy of their report "who benefits from gm crops?" and that's certainly worth reading (report, summary).
Over the years there has been criticism about the cultivation figures published annually by ISAAA because Clive James repeatedly has refused to give information about where these numbers are coming from while they are continuously refered to as the only available source for GM acreage worldwide. Not surprisingly ISAAA saw an increase in 2008 again, speaking of a "historic milestone"
However, FoE come to a very different conclusion when they reviewed the last ISAAA report as well as figures given by EuropaBio. ISAAA increased the acreage it reports by simply multiplying each hectare by the number of GM traits grown on it. So a hectare of Bt maize is a hectare of GM cultivation, but a hectare of Bt maize with herbicide tolerance adds up to two hectares - at least in the eyes of ISAAA. So if all agricultural land would be grown with triple-stack crops, we suddenly would have three times as much agricultural as before?

For the third time now the EFSA has given a positive opinion on the two maize events Bt11 and 1507.
In November 2007, Environmental Commissioner Dimas had proposed that an approval for cultivation for these Bt-maize events should not be given. In May 2008 the Commission send the two notifications back to the EFSA with the explicit question to review eleven scientific studies that had come out since the EFSA gave its last opinion. Now on 29 October 2008, the EFSA once more gave an opinion - and once more it is positive.
How can it be that over years now the Competent Authorities of several memberstates as well as the DG Environment sees risks in the cultivation of these Bt maize - but the EFSA simply maintains their position that everything is fine? Do the members of the GMO Panel have such a completely different view on what makes a risk?