NIST GCR 01-825
A Guide to the EU Directive on General Product Safety
Member States have to adopt the necessary laws, regulations, and administrative provisions to make producers and distributors comply with their obligations under this Directive.
In particular, Member States have to establish or nominate authorities to monitor and ensure that only safe products are placed on the market. Further, states must ensure that such authorities have the requisite power to take the appropriate measures incumbent upon them under this Directive, including the imposing of suitable penalties. Then states have to notify the Commission of the said authorities. The Commission then passes on the information to the other Member States.
Member States must have the necessary powers, acting in accordance with the degree or risk, to adopt appropriate measures that, among other things:
- organize appropriate checks on the safety properties of products, even after they are placed on the market as "safe;"
- require all necessary information from the parties concerned;
- take samples of a product or a product line and subject them to safety checks;
- subject product marketing to prior conditions designed to ensure product safety and require that suitable warnings be affixed regarding the risks which the product may present;
- make arrangements to ensure that persons who might be exposed to a risk from a product are informed in good time and in a suitable manner of the said risk by, among other things, publishing special warnings;
- temporarily prohibit, for the period required to carry out the various checks, anyone from supplying, offering to supply, or exhibiting a product or product batch, whenever there are precise and consistent indications that they are dangerous;
- prohibit the placing on the market of a product or product batch which has proved dangerous and establish the accompanying measures needed to ensure that the ban is complied with; and
- organize the effective and immediate withdrawal of a dangerous product or product batch already on the market and, if necessary, its destruction under appropriate conditions.
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