ASEAN Regional Integration Support from the EU

Validation Workshop on Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Non Tariff Measures (NTMs) in Vietnam for the ASEAN Repository

Hanoi, Vietnam, 10 February 2020 

ARISE Plus Project (Funded by European Union) and the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) of Vietnam co-organized a workshop in Hanoi, Viet Nam to validate Viet Nams Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs) in the regulatory area of Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) for upload on the ASEAN Trade Repository (ATR). The validation workshop was the final step in the complex work supported by ARISE Plus to identify, classify, properly package and upload on the ATR all NTMs of all 10 ASEAN Member States. A Total of 336 TBT NTMs were validated by Viet Nam and shall be uploaded on the ATR ahead of the next meeting of the ASEAN Coordinating Committee for the Implementation of the ATIGA (CCA), which meets in Bandung, Indonesia on 26-28 February 2020.

38 officials from 8 Vietnamese ministries and agencies, competent for trade-related TBT regulation, joined the validation workshop, which was opened by Mr. Luong Hoang Thai, Director General of the Multilateral Trade Policy Department at the MoIT, current SEOM and ATF-JCC Chair, and by Mr. Paul Mandl, Team Leader of the ARISE Plus Project. The discussions for the validation of Viet Nams TBT NTMs were steered by Ms. Nguyen Quynh Nga, Deputy Director General at the MoIT and current SEOM Lead for Viet Nam, Mr. Paolo R. Vergano, ARISE Plus Key Expert on Trade Facilitation and Transparency, and Mr. Khoi Nguyen Minh, ARISE Plus Expert on International Trade.

The European Union, through its flagship ARISE and ARISE Plus Programmes, has been supporting ASEAN since 2012 with several activities to implement the ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement (ATIGA), including with respect to trade-related regulatory transparency by progressively operationalizing the ATR (https://atr.asean.org). Transparency remains an absolute pre-requisite to enable regional economic integration, legal certainty, commercial predictability and an increased rules-based ASEAN, as mandated under the ASEAN Charter and the AEC Blueprint 2025. With respect to the progressive operationalization of the ATR, Viet Nam leads the way among ASEAN Member States in terms of NTMs transparency, with 251 NTMs in the area of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) regulation and 336 NTMs in the area of TBT regulation already validated and uploaded onto the ATR.

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