A Bill on updating the requirements on product safety, with particular regard to cybersecurity and online shopping, passed the first reading today.

The Bill on Amendments to the Product Conformity Attestation Act (533 SE), initiated by the Government of the Republic, should ensure conformity with the EU law and update the regulation of accreditation fees.

The General Product Safety Regulation of the EU imposes a clear obligation on the producers to assess the risks related to cybersecurity and the use of AI. The Regulation also provides that the consumer must have access to the same information in an online store as in a physical store (incl. information on the producer, product code, image of the product, as well as all warnings and safety information).

One purpose of the Bill is to ensure the safety of products coming from outside the EU. The tremendous increase in online shopping has dramatically highlighted this as a problem. Under the Bill, all products delivered to the EU must in the future be labelled with the name of the responsible person within the EU. This person represents the producer and ensures solving the possible issues. Generally, this is either the importer of the product or, in the absence of the latter, an authorised representative of the producer in the EU. This amendment is an important step in holding third country producers accountable for their products in the same way that the EU producers are today.

The Bill also updates the bases for reviewing the accreditation applications by product assessment authorities and the hourly fees of the Estonian Accreditation Centre, in order to ensure a fair and transparent remuneration of all the accreditation activities. The amendments would resolve the situation where some reviewing activities of accreditation application are remunerated and some not. In the future, the review fee for any kind of application would be paid based on the volume of the work, and the hourly accreditation rate would include not only the work of the head assessor but also the official who makes the assessment decision or carries out technical inspection, which are also part of the assessment process. Currently, the expenses from the above activities are covered from the annual fees of all the clients. Yet both activities are related to a specific client and should be paid by them.

One Bill was dropped from the proceedings

The Riigikogu rejected at the first reading the Bill on Amendments to the Government of the Republic Act (523 SE), initiated by the Centre Party Group. The purpose of the Bill is to make the paying of representation allowance to members of the government transparent and establish the possibility of checking that the allowance was used for the purpose intended.

Under the provisions of the Bill, members of the government would be paid 20 per cent of the amount of their salary as a representation allowance. The allowance would be paid based on the expense receipts submitted by the members of the government. The relevant terms would be set out in the Rules of the Government of the Republic, to be approved by a Regulation of the Government of the Republic.

During the debate, Mart Maastik took the floor on behalf of Isamaa Parliamentary Group and Andrei Korobeinik on behalf of the Centre Party Group.

The Constitutional Committee moved to reject the Bill at the first reading. 41 members of the Riigikogu supported the rejection and eight were against it.

Verbatim record of the sitting (in Estonian)

Video recording will be available to watch later on the Riigikogu YouTube channel.

Riigikogu Press Service
Maiki Vaikla
+372 631 6456, +372 5666 9508
[email protected]
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