Summer holidays are over, which means EA work and discussion restarted actively with our Members coming back to autumn Committees’ meetings with their busy agendas.

First, the Certification Committee meeting took place on 3-4 September 2019 in Berlin (Germany), with 56 participants from 38 NABs and 4 stakeholder organizations.

The Certification Committee (CC) previously prepared a Guidance document for the selection of Conformity Assessment Standards. This document helps Conformity Assessment Bodies to identify, between Product Certification and Management System Certification for a given conformity assessment activity, which one suits them best. A workshop will be organized in early 2020 by the HHC, with keen interest from CC on how to apply the guidance.

The CC is also elaborating a draft document on Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) described in Regulation (EU) No. 1151/2012 (article 5). These two norms provide information on the origin and characteristics of the products giving Consumers a certain level of assurance on the quality of the products they buy.

The Committee has also started the revision of EA-6/04: EA guidelines on the accreditation of certification of primary sector products by means of sampling of sites and EA-3/12: EA Policy for Accreditation of Organic Production Certification, which should be ready for publication at the end of 2020.

A new Task Force Group composed of CAI (Czech Republic), ENAC (Spain), and European Welding Federation has been set up to work on the Certification scheme for persons when certification is performed according to:

  • ISO 9606-x Qualification testing of welders — Fusion welding
  • ISO 9712 Non-destructive testing — Qualification and certification of NDT personnel.

ISO/IEC 17029 – Conformity assessment — General principles and requirements for validation and verification bodies will be published in October 2019.

A CC Training Workshop on ISO/IEC 17029 is organized by EA Secretariat on 28 November 2019 in Paris (France). A second session will take place in 2020. For further information, please contact Sandy Adonel.

The next CC meeting is on 11-12 March 2020 in Sofia (Bulgaria).