Services Standards: Defining the Core Consumer Elements ... - ANEC

Hans-W. Micklitz
• The outlook of technical standards resembles very much a piece of
legislation. However, despite the similarity standards are often not
drafted by lawyers and they do not constitute ‘law’ in the proper sense.
Problems arise, therefore, if legal concepts are redefined in technical
standards.
• The world of standardisation appears to be separate from the legal world
of binding or default regulation. The two worlds might coexist without too
much overlap if standardisation is limited to defining technical issues in
the proper sense. However, the more standardisation oversteps these
boundaries – and it is the explicit policy of the European Commission
that Standards Bodies are moving this way in particular in the field of
services, – the greater the necessity to indicate the legal environment in
which the standards have to be embedded.
• Standard-setting in the field of services therefore becomes less technical
and much more political. This implies the need to link legal regulation to
technical regulation and vice versa.
• Most of the rules and standards are sector-specific, although quite a
number of issues bear a horizontal character. In law, the vertical
approach leads to inconsistencies and to frictions. The same
phenomenon may be observed in the field of standardisation. Sectorspecific
initiatives may not create friction as long as they are limited to
simply standardising technical specifications. However, once they
overstep these boundaries and enter into areas that affect public policy
issues, such as safety or security, contract formation or complaint
handling, sector-specific approaches on services may end up in
confusion, if similar or identical issues are dealt with differently.
• National and European Standards Bodies often take action in the
shadow of a forthcoming EC directive or regulation. They do not really
benefit from the leeway which is left to them even by the legislator, e.g. in
particular in education and skills, equipment and premises, and, last but
not least, monitoring and inspection.
There are three initiatives which come near to what consumers might expect
from such standardisation. Best practice is found in the EN 7 14804 on language
tours 8 , the French initiative on standards for resident people (AFNOR 9 NF X 50-
7 EN stands for European Standard.
8 EN 14804 – ‘Language study tour providers – Requirements’.
9 AFNOR stands for Association de la Normalisation Française.
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