Since the European Union’s main aims include consumer protection and ensuring product safety, you might be forgiven for thinking that the EU’s rules in those areas would be clear and straightforward. But you would be wrong. Manufacturers and distributors in Europe don’t have the luxury of a single harmonised set of product safety, marking, and labelling regulations. Very often, products are not correctly marked or labelled for sale in the EU because the applicable rules are either unclear or esoteric.
In this Alert, we will examine the main mark required to designate product safety in Europe – the CE mark – and the wide range of other labelling and marking requirements that exist for different categories of products.