The 40th Meeting of the EA Advisory Board, which took place on Wednesday 17 October 2018 in Brussels (Belgium) in EFTA offices, was the occasion to elect a new EA Advisory Board and welcome a future EA Recognized Stakeholder.
During this 40th meeting, a new Chair of the EAAB was unanimously elected. Maureen LOGGHE (National Authorities College – Federal Public Service (FPS) Economy of Belgium) will succeed to Michael NITSCHE (BAM, Germany).
As the new Chair of the EAAB, Maureen Logghe would like to reinforce the visibility of accreditation and enhance the link between stakeholders and Board Members “Accreditation becomes more and more integrated in European legislation. Accreditation supports competitiveness of European enterprises. My aim as new Chair of the EA Advisory Board is to support and enhance confidence in accreditation and to assure accreditation becomes more visible.
As the EAAB represents the different stakeholders, I would like to enhance the link between the stakeholders and the Board members.
As part of the National Authorities college, it became obvious to me that not all information gets to the competent authority. Therefore I would like to ensure that information finds its way to the right place and I would like to ask the other colleges to step up the efforts as well to ensure that everybody has access to the information required.
As the new EAAB Chair I would ask EA to speed up the peer evaluation re-engineering process.
Accreditation is an excellent tool and should be promoted!”
At the same time, Christian PRILLER (CAB college – CEOC International) and Martin STADLER (Industry college – SIEMENS) were elected as Vice-Chairs for a 3rd term.
New challenges for the EA Advisory Board
Brand new key topics await the new Chair and Vice-Chairs for discussion during the coming 2 years:
- Recognition of the work of EAAB by EA
- Promotion of accreditation towards regulators
- Harmonization and consistency of accreditation requirements and practices across Europe
- Consistency in EA member ABs action at international level
This list is likely to evolve as Board Members were asked to come up with proposal for new keys topics and actions, to be discussed as from the next meeting in May 2019.
AEBIOM, future EA recognized stakeholder
This 40th meeting of the EA Advisory Board also supported AEBIOM application as a new Recognized Stakeholder. AEBIOM is the platform of the European bioenergy sector and represents national associations and other organizations in the sector from across Europe and overseas, which aim to promote the interests of the European bioenergy sector.
To guarantee the quality of certification schemes for biomass fuels, AEBIOM relies upon accreditation as a means to demonstrate efficiency and reliability of conformity assessment functions, and therefore has a major interest in the development of effective rules and practices for accreditation.
At its previous meeting in May 2018, the Board had agreed to extend its membership and create a new seat for a representative of conformity assessment scheme owners having a status of EA recognised stakeholder. As a result, Mr. Emmanuel Geneiatakis representing FAMI-QS (the Quality and Safety System for Speciality Feed Ingredients asbl), was elected to fulfil the new seat.
The next meeting of the EA Advisory Board will take place on 14 May 2019 in Brussels