General Product Safety

Contact: Corado Mattiuzzo (mattiuzzo@kan.de)

The General Product Safety Directive, 2001/95/EC, came into force on 15 January 2002 and had to be transposed by the Member States into national law by 15 January 2004. In Germany, the General Product Safety Directive was transposed into national law by the "Act on Technical Work Equipment and Consumer Products" (otherwise known as the "Equipment and Product Safety Act" or by its German abbreviation, GPSG), which was adopted as Article 1 of the "Act on the Reorganisation of the Safety of Technical Work Equipment and Consumer Products" of 6 January 2004. Consequently, even consumer products that are not subject to specific directives benefit from the presumption of conformity if they are designed in accordance with harmonized European standards. Presumption of conformity means that a product designed in accordance with harmonized European standards complies with the requirements of the General Product Safety Directive. The same is true of "migration products", i.e. consumer products that are also used at the workplace or technical work equipment that is, for example, sold or hired out to consumers by DIY stores.

Germany has set up a committee, the Committee for Technical Work Equipment and Consumer Products (AtAV), on the basis of Section 13 of the GPSG. The committee's tasks are to

• advise the federal government on issues concerning the safety of technical work equipment and consumer products,
• identify the standards and other technical specifications of the types mentioned in Section 4, Subsection 2, Sentence 3 of the GPSG and to
• identify national technical specifications where such specifications are provided for in legal regulations of the type described in Section 3, Subsection 1.

The committee is composed of experts from the national and federal-state authorities responsible for safety and health, the notified bodies, the institutions for statutory accident insurance, DIN, the Commission for Occupational Health and Safety and Standardization, employer associations, trade unions and stakeholder associations, particularly manufacturers' and consumers' associations.

For further information on this subject, see:

• KANBrief 4/04: Greater legal security in the use of standards
• KANBrief 2/02: A major need for harmonized standards on general product safety
• KANBrief 4/01: Revision of the General Product Safety Directive