quote from European Commission's website
In my previous post I have mention that TOBI is a European project. Continuing that idea I will try to present to you an overview of what is the role of European Union (EU) in some of the standards and what areas of technology have European projects.
The idea behind the standardization processes of European Union is more or less based on the same foundations as Schumann Declaration in 1950, Single European Act in 1986 or Maastricht Treaty in 1992: the prosperity of Europe. The prosperity is based on the creation of an internal market and different technical rules, regulations and standards in the member states create a barrier to trade and hamper the progress to a general internal market. In order to break this barrier the standardization is necessary. This process can be further extended to an international level in the future.
The European Commission (EC) is the driving force of European Union, the executive body. You can look at it as being the engine of EU, being responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and day-to-day running of the Union. EC provides funds for a vast number of European projects from different domains that are meant to improve the lives of citizens.
There are three officially recognized European standards bodies: the European Committee for Standardization (CEN), the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Together, these three non-profit organizations form the European system for technical standardization. Even though they work closely with the European Commission they are not EU institutions. Usually, the full members of these organizations are the standardization bodies of all the EU member states. However, states and organization from all over the globe can be associates.
The way the standardization bodies cooperate with EC is through mandates. The Commission sends a requests to them, asking to develop an European standard that provides solution with a legal provision. This results in an harmonised standard, after an open, transparent and consensus process. The products that comply with the European standards are marked with the Keymark, a certification mark owned by CEN and CENELEC. Below you can see a list of domains in which harmonised standards were elaborated.
As it is mentioned on CENELEC's website there can be a huge number of stakeholders in the European Standardization and they may vary, depending on the project, such as: industry and commerce, service providers, public authorities and regulators, academia and research centers, trade associations, consumers, small and medium enterprises and other public and private institutions.
The Vienna Agreement is an act signed between the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and CEN that aims to avoid duplication and conflicts between European and International standards. All three European standardization bodies closely cooperate with ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in order to achieve the goal they call 'one standard, one test, accepted everywhere'.
In future posts we will focus more on the project TOBI and the standards that came out of it.
You can find more about European Standards at these addresses and books:
- The European Standardization Regulatory Framework, by W. Hesser and A. Czaya.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Committee_for_Standardization
- http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/european-standards/index_en.htm
- https://www.cen.eu/
- http://www.cencenelec.eu/
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