Responsibilities of the SPS
Information Centre:
The Information Centre is
responsible for answering all reasonable questions and providing
relevant documents regarding:
-
any sanitary or phytosanitary
regulations adopted or proposed within the country;
-
any control and inspection
procedures, production and quarantine treatment, pesticide
tolerance and food additive approval procedures, which are operated
within the country;
-
risk assessment procedures,
factors taken into consideration, as well as the determination of
the appropriate level of sanitary or phytosanitary
protection;
-
the membership and participation
of the country, or of relevant bodies within its territory, in
international and regional sanitary and phytosanitary organizations
and systems;
-
the membership and participation
of the country in bilateral and multilateral agreements and
arrangements within the scope of the SPS Agreement;
-
the texts of any such agreements
and arrangements.
Information Centre should also
provide, upon request, information on participation in any
bilateral or multilateral equivalence agreements and
arrangements.
While the notification authority may handle questions on notified
draft measures, the Information Centre is responsible for answering
questions on all existing SPS measures (even those that existed
before the WTO and the SPS Agreement came into force).
The Information Centre and/or
Notification Authority has also a responsibility to ensure that
central government organizations which develop regulations,
technical regulations, standards and conformance assessment issues
are aware of the responsibilities of WTO Members under the SPS
Agreements. The bodies need to be aware, principally in the area of
the need to notify measures which could affect trade with other
Members and take comments from Members into account.
Procedures of the SPS
Information Centre:
The part major tasks of an
Information Centre that it handles on a routine basis are the
following:
-
document and information
requests;
-
general enquiries; and
-
delivery and charging.
Information
requests
Other government agencies than the
Information Centre in the country will continue to receive direct
requests on matters such as those outlined above, and they should
be free to continue answering them. Enquiries that come to the
individual units within government agencies (i.e. not through the
enquiry point) can be answered directly and do not need to be
processed through the enquiry point system. However, the
Information Centre is listed by the WTO as having this
responsibility, and must respond to any requests made of it.
Requests to the Information Centre may come from other countries’
enquiry points or originate from other interested parties (such as
industry groups) in countries, and from non-Member countries.
Although the legal obligation is only to respond to requests from
other WTO Members, the Information Centre is encouraged to treat
all such enquiries equally, and respond to all reasonable requests
for information about the country's SPS measures. It is best to
reply directly to whoever makes the request, but to support the
Information Centre system, it is recommended to send a copy of
replies (and a list of material supplied) to the relevant
country's Information Centre.
Requests for information that are best filled (completely or in
part) by another agency should be forwarded to the appropriate
agency. That agency should be asked to advise the Information
Centre when the request is fulfilled; if this is not done within a
reasonable time the Information Centre should remind that agency to
do so.
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