“Goods package”: EU made step forward

- risk-based approach could have been strengthened -

Today, a compromise on EU level was found on the “Goods Package”. After a last “trilogue” meeting the European Parliament, the Council and the European Commission agreed on the ‘Compliance and Enforcement’ proposal, which is about market surveillance of EU product safety rules.

BusinessEurope Director General Markus J. Beyrer said: “The EU has made a step forward to strengthen market surveillance and to ensure that EU product safety rules in our European home market are applied. Today, insufficient enforcement of product safety undermines the level playing field for our European companies that are playing by the rules. However, the compromise does not improve surveillance across the EU for products sold directly to consumers via online platforms. The final result will oblige companies not established in the EU to appoint an economic operator within the EU who will have far-reaching obligations to remedy non-compliance. Companies that are already not complying with the rules will likely not appoint such an economic operator. This means this measure will only be a burden for companies that try to comply properly with EU rules and at the same time not really solve the problem of unsafe products.

What we need is a more risk-based approach to make market surveillance authorities in EU Member States focus more on products that actually present a risk to the consumer and less on ‘formal non-compliances’ – such as misprinting of the CE-marking or a user manual that is not provided in the right language”.