Sri Lanka will extensively review its consumer protection regulations, Industry and Commerce Minister Rishad Bathiudeen said on Monday (8).
He said the current framework for safeguarding consumer wellbeing does “not appear to be satisfactory anymore in the face of huge changes and complexities in modern consumer trends and dynamics.” Minister Bathiudeen’s statement was delivered by Additional Secretary M. A. Thajudeen to a conference of United Nations, European Union, and Sri Lankan government representatives at the Shangri-La Hotel Monday morning. The goal of the five-day conference is to bring Sri Lanka’s standards in line with the UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection and implement regulatory impact analysis across agencies to generate better policy.
Bathiudeen said 100 countries around the world have already used the guidelines to strengthen their national consumer safeguard regulations.
He said that in a changing world, it’s time for Sri Lanka to catch up.
Emerging complexities in consumption, such as the lack of transparency in trans-national production processes, complicated liability relations, and the increase of online payments, are “major new concerns that the existing mechanisms in Sri Lanka are not able to respond well to,” he said. “Therefore both our backward mechanisms, and rapid changes in consumption formats, now demand urgent reforms to our policies of consumer wellbeing.”
The initiative is funded as part of an 8 million Euro grant from the EU and the International Trade Centre, Bathiudeen added.
Add new comment