How do International Standards Integrate with Regional Standards?
The standards produced by the international organisations mentioned above are recommendations – voluntary not mandatory. How do they sit with regional standards, which may be legally implemented? Let’s take the British Standards Institute as an example (which operates in over 90 countries). A British Standard is prefixed by BS. If it is an ISO standard as well, it would also carry an ISO number. As Britain is also a member of the European Union, it may also carry an EN prefix. For example, in 1979 BSI published the BS5750 quality standard. In 1987 the standard was adopted by ISO and the code became ISO 9000. In 1994 this became BS EN ISO 9000. Moving on to European Union standards. The Central site for European standards is http://www.newapproach.org/. This is a good place to look for EU Directives. Directives define the essential requirements that goods must meet when they are placed on the market. Three European standards bodies have the task of drawing up the corresponding technical
