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 SNI Application |
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Basically the application of SNI is voluntary, meaning that no prohibition will be imposed on activity and product that does not fulfil SNI requirement.
Therefore, to guarantee wide acceptance and benefit of SNI it is necessary to consider the following important factors: norm application - openness for all relevant stakeholders, transparency and fairness, as well as being in line with international standard development. However for the protection of public interest, country safety, national economic development and environment conservation, the government can make selection on certain SNI and to apply them as obligatory.
The implementation of SNI wajib (obligatory) is carried out through technical regulation issued by government office having the authorization as activities and product circulation regulator. In this case, activities and products that are not in accordance with SNI provisions are considered prohibited.
The validity of SNI wajib should be cautiously implemented in order to avoid the following impacts:
(a) constraint in healthy competitiveness
(b) constraint in innovations; and
(c) constraint in UKM development
The best way is limiting the application of SNI wajib for activity or product with a relatively high risk so that regulation is absolutely needed for activity and product circulation.
The implementation of SNI wajib has to be supported by market supervisions that can be carried out both during pre and post marketing. Pre-marketing supervision is needed in setting up the activity or product that has fulfilled SNI wajib provisions while post marketing supervision is necessary in supervising and correcting activity or product that has not fulfilled SNI provisions. If conformity assessment to voluntary SNI is considered as acknowledgment, for SNI wajib it is one of the requirements to be fulfilled by any relevant stakeholder. In this case the conformity assessment is considered as part of the pre-marketing supervision conducted by the regulator.
Considering that the implementation of technical regulation in one country is also applied to imported products and in order to avoid any international/national trade barrier, WTO members including Indonesia participated in the Agreement on Technical Barrier to Trade (TBT) and Agreement on Sanitary and Phyto Sanitary Measures (SPS). The effort in minimizing the trade barrier will be well established if each country implements Good Regulatory Practices in applying obligatory standard.
In principle TBT agreement regulates the following provisions:
* If possible, national standard development should not have the objective or the impact in creating trade barrier. National Standard development should therefore refer to and not duplicate international standard should provide opportunities for stakeholders in responding and providing input and should make publication through a widely accessed media. Should differences with international standard be unavoidable, they should be easily recognised and the national standard body should be able to give explanation to any related party about the said differences.
* The technical regulation applied including the implementation of obligatory standard (standard wajib) should not cause an exceeding impact on trade barrier and therefore besides targeting its objective technical regulation should also refer to international standard. Should an application of technical provision which is different from international standard be unavoidable, notification should be made with regards to the technical regulation plan in order to give opportunities to all WTO country members in questioning and giving its opinion during a period of at least 60 days. For this purpose, each country member of WTO has to nominate an institution with responsibility as notification body and enquiry point. In Indonesia, BSN has been appointed as notification body and enquiry point for TBT agreement. In order to give opportunities to all parties to be ready, the application of technical regulation or obligatory standard will be effective at least 6 months after being promulgated. The implementation of the technical regulations should not distinguish locally manufactured products and imported ones, and cannot discriminate products from one country to the other.
* Conformity Assessment on imported product should not be different from the assessment of local product and no discrimination applied to different countries. Every country member of WTO should make it possible for producing country to have access on the conformity assessment conducted for imported product and not to create an excessive load. It would be best if the conformity assessment system applied in another country can be accepted and for this purpose, the member of WTO should give a positive response on the request of other country for an MRA agreement.
* The improvement of people's perception on standards and conformity assessment is absolutely needed to be conducted by BSN, considering that up to present people's awareness in producing or consuming a product is still based on price and not on their awareness on the quality/standard of the product. The people's minimum awareness on standard is reflected by the abundant imported products consumed by the people even if they are not in accordance with the prevailing standards and also by the low conscience of the producers in applying standards for their products except for products labelled with obligatory standard. In order improve people's awareness the following actions should be taken into consideration: continuous and sustainable national campaign, people's awareness and education program, establishment of standardization training curriculum, improvement of people's participation and involvement of training centres in education and forming standardization experts. |
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