Strengthening the Compliance of the OIC Member States
to International Standards
32
development of quality infrastructure is in the relatively early stages, and there is no capacity to issue
the large number of standards required to cover the field in terms of national economic activities. The
case studies in the next section show that some OIC member states use this approach.
International standards organizations have a difficult task, in that their standards need to be applicable
in a wide range of contexts. Countries differ markedly in terms of their level of economic development,
consumer preferences in relation to various issues, level of industrialization, not to mention institutional
and cultural factors. For this reason, it is important for countries to participate actively in the work of
international standards bodies, so that the resulting norms can be applicable to their particular
circumstances. However, participation represents a particular challenge for developing countries,
especially those where national quality infrastructure is at an early stage of development and
standardization is not well advanced at the national level. There can be serious constraints in terms of
human, technical, and financial capacity when it comes to the participation of countries—typically
through national standards bodies or government representatives—in international standards bodies
like ISO, IEC, and the Codex. As a result of these constraints, developing countries sometimes claim that
international standards are unduly focused on the conditions prevailing in developed countries, which
constitute the bulk of the active members of the relevant committees where the standards are drafted.
Table 1 sets out the current state of play with respect to OIC member states’ participation in the main
international standards bodies, namely ISO, IEC, and the Codex. It is not possible to cover all
international standards bodies in this report, so it was decided to focus on those that are most active in
domains of interest to a broad cross-section of OIC member states, either from a production or
consumption perspective.
It is immediately clear from Table 1 that even at the level of membership, as distinct from active
participation, positions differ greatly from one OIC member state to another, and from one international
standards organization to another. For example, all but two OIC member states (Somalia and Palestine)
are members of the Codex, so at least in formal terms, they have the ability to take part in deliberations
on international food safety standards. By contrast, only 11 OIC member states are full members of IEC,
so the ability of the remainder of the Organization’s membership to have a voice in the development of
international standards for the electrical products industry is severely limited.
In the case of ISO—which has the broadest sectoral scope of any of the international standards
organizations considered in Table 1—the evidence is more mixed. 35 OIC member states’ standards
organizations are member bodies of ISO, with the right to take full part in its deliberations and
standards development activities, including voting on the adoption of standards. Another 13 countries