On The Improvement Of The Legal System Of Compulsory Product Certification

Compulsory product certification is a product certification scheme which is compulsorily implemented by the government authorities on relevant products to assess the conformity to the national technical requirements (standards and/or technical specifications) for the purpose of the protection of the consumer safety and health, environment and national security. The first part of this thesis introduces the compulsory product certification scheme. It introduces the important terms and definitions in compulsory certification field, the Chinese legislation system on compulsory product certification; it studies the foreign legislation on compulsory product certification, the relation between compulsory product certification and other evaluation scheme. The second part demonstrates the conformity of the compulsory product certification scheme to the WTO TBT agreements through analysis to the core content of the TBT agreements, i.e., standards, technical regulations, conformity assessment procedures and the basic principles of TBT agreements, i.e., avoidance of unnecessary obstacles to trade, non-discrimination and national treatment, harmonization, Equivalence of technical regulations, mutual recognition of conformity assessment procedures, transparency. The third part of this thesis studies some issues emerging in the practice of the Chinese compulsory product certification. It points out the disadvantage in our current legislation system that the compulsory standards are acting as technical regulations, put forwards the suggestion to improve our technical regulation system according to TBT agreement; suggest to extend the product scope subject to compulsory product certification through analysis; analyzed the existing problems in our compulsory product certification models, provide the recommendation to change our current practice and allow the manufacturer self-declaration model according to EU directives; at last put forward the suggestion on improving our compulsory product certification legislation system.