The making of European standards is a voluntary, open and market-driven process carried out by European standardisation organisations (CEN, CENELEC and ETSI) with the support of their members (national standardisation committees such as AFNOR, BSI, DIN). A significant share of European standards (up to 70% in the electro-technical field) is derived from the parallel work of international standardisation organisations (ISO, IEC and ITU). More and more standards are “harmonised” under a European Commission mandate in order to facilitate compliance to EU legislation, mostly under New Approach directives. In the past few years regulators have increased pressure to introduce a wide range of societal concerns into standards such as environmental aspects and design. This may end up undermining interest from industry, a major investor in the process, to devote adequate resources to European standards work


Standardisation issues continue to be on our agenda for a number of reasons: firstly, because they are very relevant to global trade and secondly, because industry needs to preserve both the independence of the standardisation process and its sustainability at European level. We steadily advocate for achieving a balance between making use of harmonised standards under the mandate of a New Approach legislation and preserving standardisation as a market-driven process, which should remain voluntary, open and attractive for all stakeholders, including NGOs and SMEs.

In order to achieve our objectives, Orgalime regularly contributes to various Commission consultations on the role of standardisation in the framework of EU policy and regulations. We are also present directly through our member in the technical bureaux, safety fora etc. of CEN and CENELEC.