Under a package of measures presented by the Commission on 14 February 2007, companies wanting to export to another member state will no longer be required to carry out costly tests to prove that their products comply with that country's rules and standards.
Instead, national authorities will bear the cost of demonstrating that a product is unsafe if they wish to remove it from their market.
The plan is an attempt to force governments to recognise counterparts' quality and safety standards for goods that are not harmonised at EU-level, such as kettles and bicycles. This is already supposed to be taking place, under 'mutual recognition', but, because each country retains the right to establish additional technical standards, the principle is not always respected.
"We are talking about a very high number [of national technical rules] indeed, and we're not always convinced that these rules serve protection of health or the consumer or the environment. Occasionally, we do get the impression that they are there to make market access more difficult or impossible," said Commission Vice- President Günter Verheugen, who is also in charge of enterprise and industrial policy.
Such obstacles are a particular problem for small and medium enterprises, many of which are dissuaded from operating outside their home markets because the costs of additional tests required by some countries surpass the profit that the manufacturer could earn by marketing his product.
The Commission estimates that such barriers are costing the EU around €150 billion in trade each year.
