Tuesday 6 October 2009

World Standards Day- EU Commission workshop on EXPRESS

The European Commission is dedicating this year's world standards day for discussing the work and tasks of the Expert Panel on the Revision of the European Standardisation System (EXPRESS).

The conference title is forward looking: "European Standardisation for the next decade". It will be held on October 14, 2009, in Brussels in the Charlemagne Building. Registration is now open and the agenda can be downloaded on the respective Commission website.

For the basis of the discussion at the conference, the EXPRESS group has produced an Issue Paper which is available online for download.

This Issue Paper outlines the key challenges and elements that are discussed in EXPRESS and that have been identified as critical for the future European standardisation system. Apart from organisational and financial issues these include most notably globalisation, standardisation and innovation, services and the relation to global standards development organisations. The focal question is, of course, in which way public policies should be refocussed to better address issues around standardisation and to better use standards for achieving and promoting the respective policy objective. Moreover, it needs to be decided which changes need to be made to the European legal framework on standardisation, above all to Directive 98/34.

The Commission explicitly invites all interested parties to submit comments to the EXPRESS Issue Paper.

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