Standardisation

Standards are at the core of the European Union (EU) internal market’s machinery. They ensure that products and services are interoperable with one another, are safe to use and will not harm people’s health or the environment. They generate confidence that a product or service is fit for purpose and allow businesses to compete throughout the EU and globally. Standards also have a key role to play in enabling innovation: they provide a common framework on which to build by setting out the essential characteristics of a product or service and defining common vocabularies.

For goods and services subject to EU harmonisation legislation, European standards are developed by the European standardisation bodies (the European Committee for Standardisation, the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation and the European Telecommunication Standards Institute), which, on the request of the European Commission, draw up technical specifications. Industry plays an important role in this consensus-building process, as do the national standardisation bodies of EU Member States and of the European Free Trade Association countries, representatives of small and medium-sized enterprises, public authorities and representatives of consumer, trade union and environmental interests.

As a rule, businesses are not obliged to use European standards; they may choose another technical solution to demonstrate their products’ compliance with mandatory legal requirements. Nevertheless, compliance with a harmonised standard allows them to demonstrate more easily that their products comply with EU legislation. The list of harmonised standards is regularly updated and published in the Official Journal of the European Union.

For goods that are not, or are only partly, subject to EU harmonisation legislation, the principle of mutual recognition applies. This guarantees that any good lawfully sold in one Member State can be sold in another. This is possible even if the good does not fully comply with the technical rules of the other Member State (although there may be exceptions where public safety, health or the environment are concerned).

In February 2022, the Commission presented a new EU standardisation strategy designed to:

strengthen the EU’s global competitiveness;
ensure that new technologies reflect its democratic values; and
enable its transition towards a climate-neutral, resilient and circular economy.

Where global standards exist, the European standardisation organisations mentioned above seek to align European standards as much as possible with the international standards adopted by the recognised international standardisation organisations (the International Organization for Standardization, the International Electrotechnical Commission and the International Telecommunication Union).

Besides European and international standards, EU legislation can also contain references to national standards developed by the national standardisation bodies of EU Member States or references to technical specifications other than those developed by standard-development organisations. The legal effect of all these referenced standards and technical specifications depends on the legal nature of the reference.