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A joint agreement has
been signed by the CPA and the US Consumer Product
Safety Commission. Nancy Nord, CPSC’s Acting Chairman,
said she was glad to sign the agreement with the CPA
because Egypt is the first Arab and African country to
conclude this agreement. The aim of the agreement is to
exchange information and mutual technical cooperation to
foster consumer protection in Egypt.
The agreement also pays
attention to educating consumers about the most
important safety standards of various commodities, the
procedures of withdrawing products that are defective or
non-conforming to standards, and the procedures taken to
impose civil and criminal penalties in cooperation with
the US Department of Justice.
Nard noted that the CPSC
is completely willing to offer help and technical
support as necessary for Egypt in this regard.
The two sides have agreed
to operationalize and boost mutual cooperation and
coordination between Egypt’s CPA and the US CPSC to
obtain the greatest benefit by:
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Exchanging
information about risk evaluation reports and the
standards and cases where products are returned or
withdrawn from the market. It was agreed that a CPA
official’s contact information (email) will be added
to the contact list to be regularly and constantly
updated about cases of product return/withdrawal
from the US market.
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Providing training
and constitutional capacity building as Egypt,
represented by the Consumer Protection Agency, has
requested from the CPSC information about the most
important technical programs that have previously
been organized so that they can be studied according
to the needs of the CPA.
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Transferring the
experience related to work mechanisms that organize
relations between the CPSC and non-agency
organizations working in the field of consumer
protection, particularly in market monitoring.
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Learn from the
previous experiences of the CPSC as regards the
goods exported from China to the US market.
Nard explained that it is
very important that some new standards should be learnt
by countries who export their products to the American
market. This applies in particular to the standards of
fire-resistant textiles that the CPSC is trying to
enforce. The Consumer Protection Agency in Egypt has
been notified about this topic so that representatives
of Egyptian industries and exporter federations would
learn about it.
Coordination is being
established to transfer experience by preparing a
training course with the US CPSC on the topics that were
under discussion during the signing of the agreement.
The training will handle the specific training needs of
the Egyptian CPA.
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