Regulated Products
What are Compulsory Standards?
There are two kinds of standards, namely the VOLUNTARY and COMPULSORY standards (Technical regulations). These standards differ primarily in their implementation processes.
Whereas Stakeholders have a choice in implementing the former, they do not have the same liberty with the latter. That means compulsory standards are enforceable by Law whereas voluntary standards are not, and this enforcement of compulsory standards is provided for in the Standards Act, Section 13, which states that any one violating a compulsory standard is committing an offense.
Section 14 of the same Act provides for Fines and Penalties for such offenses, and it states that, anyone found guilty of violating a compulsory standard is liable for imprisonment of 3 years and a fine of P3000.00.
Products that need to conform to compulsory standards are referred to as Regulated Products
WTO Considerations :
It should be noted that Botswana is a member state of the World Trade Organization (WTO), so BOBS takes into account the demands of WTO Technical Barriers to Trade (WTO-TBT) Regulations and Code of Good Practice during the process of establishing compulsory standards.
The WTO-TBT Regulations and Code of good practice among others provide the Criteria for establishing and implementing technical regulations, and also cautions against making them unnecessarily too stringent for fear of the resultant non-compliance and the implications of such as well creating Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT).
The Compulsory Standards Unit (CSU) within BOBS is responsible for the enforcement of the implementation of compulsory standards and the implementation of Standards
Import Inspection Regulations (SIIR) – (Botswana Product Conformity Programme). The enforcement is done using the following services