The Russian Ministry of Agriculture published on regulation.gov.ru He developed a draft decision of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) to tighten inspections in the countries of the Eurasian Union (EAEU) of the quality of tobacco products. Currently, the union has a single technical regulation for tobacco, but the procedure for confirming the compliance of manufactured and imported products with its requirements is not detailed, and countries use national rules, which leads to "excessive restrictions," the note says, and also, obviously, creates a disagreement on the recognition of such products as legal in the EAEU single market. The proposal of the Ministry of Agriculture is de facto an attempt to solve locally for one of the mass consumer goods the general problem of quality assurance, which has been discussed for many years in Rosaccreditation.
The Ministry of Agriculture proposes to the EEC to eliminate the uncertainty arising from differences in the verification of compliance of tobacco products with the requirements of the EAEU technical regulations (TR CU 035/2014), describing in it detailed standardized procedures for companies to obtain documents on product compliance with its requirements, as well as requirements for detailed disclosure of standards, test methods, quality management systems, data on turnover participants and their counterparties, as well as the distribution of responsibility between manufacturers and their authorized dealers for non-compliance of tobacco products with technical regulations.
The draft assumes that declarations of conformity of tobacco products to the requirements of the TR CU are registered in a single register and on this basis the products are marked with a "single mark of product circulation on the Union market in accordance with the procedure approved by the Commission."
The draft also regulates the validity period of declarations — depending on whether they apply to production or import, they are three or five years, but if the document is issued for a batch of tobacco products, it is indefinite. The Ministry of Agriculture also proposes to fix in the TR CU the retention periods of documents on the basis of which declarations (test reports, etc.) are registered. An alternative to declaration of conformity is certification of production — its procedure, storage of documents and evidence of product compliance with the requirements of the TR CU is also strictly regulated. The product certification body conducts a periodic (once a year) assessment of certified tobacco products, and according to its results, the certificate may be suspended or revoked, which is also recorded in the unified register of certificates.
The model for the changes, as follows from the explanatory note to the draft, was Directive 2014/40/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of the European Union "On the approximation of legislative, regulatory and administrative provisions of the EU Member States in the field of production, marketing and sale of tobacco products" - the de facto problems of the EU and the EAEU, which created The European Union acted as a model, they are quite similar. The Ministry of Agriculture defines them as "the absence in the technical regulations of the Union, including TR CU 035/2014, of unified terms related to product conformity assessment, uniform detailed conformity assessment procedures, and therefore these procedures are conducted, inter alia, in accordance with the national legislation of the member States of the Union, which leads to opacity and redundancy of duties, restrictions and (or) prohibitions for business entities".
Obviously, we are talking about bans on the turnover of products that have not passed national conformity assessment in one of the countries, although they have been put into circulation in another — with formally "free movement of goods" on the territory of the union.
It should be noted that the proposal of the Ministry of Agriculture is an attempt to solve a problem locally, for one product, which has been repeatedly stated in Rosaccreditation. This is the problem of the lack of a unified product quality assurance system in the EAEU. After the agency "cleared" the Russian conformity assessment market, businesses are actively using more lenient requirements in other countries, and attempts to negotiate a coordinated struggle between the authorities of the EAEU member states with "paper" certificates and "commercial" testing laboratories have not yet led to success.
"The approval of specific conformity assessment rules for tobacco products in the EAEU technical regulations will clarify these processes for entrepreneurs of all EAEU member states and make them more predictable," says Kirill Kuznetsov, head of the Opora Russia Committee on Excisable Goods. However, the changes will not be rapid: the estimated time for their implementation is 180 days from the date of the official publication of the EEC decision, if it is adopted.
Source: