General Standards
Croatia is a member of the EU, and it has harmonized its technical standards with the EU directives. The European Union is in a continuous process of harmonizing technical regulations, standards and conformity assessment procedures to facilitate the circulation of products on the internal market without any additional testing and certification.
Standards organizations
The Croatian Standards Institute (HZN) is responsible for the preparation, adoption, editing and publication of Croatian standards. HZN members include Croatian manufacturers, testing and measuring laboratories and certification bodies, educational and scientific institutions, chambers of commerce, industry associations, consumer associations, and government institutions. About 0.2 % of Croatian standards are of local origin, the rest of them being European and/or international standards. As per EU directives, the Croatian standards are voluntary.
Conformity Assesment
The Ministry is responsible for preparing and implementing technical regulations for specific products. It is also responsible for defining the related conformity assessment procedure: the Ministry of Health is in charge for medicinal products, the Ministry of Construction for construction products etc.
Product Certification
According to the Croatian Law on General Products Safety all the goods must be safe. However, there are some products which do not require certification. Certain products can be self-certified by the manufacturer or the importer, while other require a third party certification before they can be sold on the market.
Products that can be self-certified require a manufacturer’s or importer’s declaration of conformity and the accompanying technical documentation (in Croatian). In the case of a third-party certification, the relevant Ministry or other government institution designates specific institutions to serve as conformity assessment bodies and authorizes them to issue certificates of conformity for that type of product.
Acreditation
The Croatian Accreditation Agency is the body which certifies that private sector laboratories, companies and physical persons meet certain standards required to participate in the conformity assessment process.
The European Union has developed harmonized standards to be used for accreditation of the third parties in the conformity assessment process in order to enable creation of an EU-wide network of equally technically capable laboratories and conformity assessment bodies whose certificates are valid throughout the EU.
Contacts
Croatian Standards Institute
Website: http://www.hzn.hr
Address: Ulica grada Vukovara 78, Zagreb, Croatia
Tel: +385-1-610-6095
Fax: +385-1-610-9321
