AEC to boost consumer protection in Asean

   AEC to boost consumer protection in Asean

Business Mirror | 23 April 2014

As part of the Asean Economic Community (AEC), the Asean Committee on Consumer Protection (ACCP) is now intensifying its efforts on initiatives for consumer protection.

ACCP members met on Wednesday in Makati City to continue discussions on measures that will assist consumers in coping with the effects of the AEC in 2015.

The ACCP targets that in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean)  integration, all member-states must have consumer-protection law.

“In general in all Asean, we achieved almost 90 percent,” Trade Consumer Protection Group Undersecretary Victorio Mario Dimagiba said in the sidelines of the ninth ACCP meeting.

To date, eight Asean members already have consumer-protection law. Myanmar and Cambodia are now working on this area.

To further hasten consumer protection, the ACCP will be working on advocacies and crafting policy digest, which will be “quick and easy-to-understand tools for consumers,” according to Dimagiba.

The committee also targets to simplify procedures on cross-border mechanism.

“In consumer protection, we are fine-tuning our cross-border mechanism. In simple term, in the Philippines we have 3Rs; repair, replace and refund. We are simplifying the procedures on how that could be also applied across the 10 Asean member-states,” Dimagiba explained.

The ACCP also pushes for harmonization of consumer-protection law.

In this case, Dimagiba said the Department of Trade and Industry will be submitting a draft to amend the national consumer-protection law to Sen. Paolo Benigno Aquino IV, who chairs the Senate Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship.

He noted that amendments to the law will include increasing administrative and criminal penalties.

Last the ACCP has set up a web site in which Asean consumers can file complaints online.

“We have a web site already—aseanconsumer.org where any citizen of Asean, any citizen that have complaint in any consumer transaction when they are visiting Asean, can just log on to that web site and file the complaints,” Dimagiba said.

“The group is doing well in terms of achieving the deliverables for the target before 2015. The next step is to think of the post-2015 agenda, the post-2015 work plan. This time, we have to go beyond advocacy and more on the implementation stage,” Brunei Darussalam Asean Chairman Hjh May Fa’ezah Hj Ahmad Ariffin said.

Meanwhile, the Philippines is now hosting the four-day ninth ACCP meeting, which is attended by delegates from Asean members such as Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Philippines.