The Senate passed the General Product Safety bill on August 7, implementing unified safety requirements for non-food goods and reshaping how the country regulates products on the market.

Under the new bill, manufacturers and importers will be required to assess risks before bringing a product to market and to recall it if a hazard is later identified.

Anvar Tuychiev, chairman of the Senate Committee on Agricultural, Water Management and Environmental Affairs, told the chamber that Uzbekistan's foreign trade commodity nomenclature currently includes more than 13,000 product categories, of which over 7,000 have no general safety requirements in place.

As a result, he said, the obligations of manufacturers and importers to ensure the safety of such goods — and their liability for failing to do so — have never been clearly defined.

The law was drafted by the Agency for Technical Regulation to implement a presidential decree issued April 18, 2025, aimed at boosting production, exports and entrepreneurship and improving the effectiveness of trade and industrial policy. One of its goals is to bring Uzbekistan's technical regulation system into line with World Trade Organization standards.

From pre-sale inspection to lifecycle safety

Tuychiev said the current system is focused mainly on controls applied before a product reaches the market — mandatory certification, compliance assessments against technical regulations, and related paperwork.

That approach, he said, does not allow risks to be identified and addressed quickly once a product is already in circulation.

The new model calls for risk assessment across a product's entire lifecycle — from design and manufacturing through import, storage, transport, sale and consumer use. It also introduces product traceability, rapid recall procedures for dangerous goods, and consumer notification requirements.

The law sets general safety requirements for all non-food products. For goods that could pose a heightened risk to life and health, additional specific requirements will be set out in separate technical regulations.

With the shift to the new system, the existing Technical Regulation Law will be repealed, according to the presentation to the Senate.

Manufacturers will have to assess risk upfront

The law introduces the concept of "economic operators," a category that includes manufacturers, importers, distributors and authorized representatives.

All of them will bear responsibility for product safety regardless of how the goods are sold, including online.

For products posing a serious risk, the law envisions a rapid information-exchange system — a national counterpart to the European Union's Safety Gate — designed to quickly circulate warnings about dangerous products and pull them from circulation nationwide.

Marketplaces

A separate discussion during the session focused on e-commerce.

Senator Malika Kadirkhanova noted that consumers are increasingly buying goods through foreign platforms, naming AliExpress, Amazon, Alibaba and Temu specifically, and asked how product safety and market oversight would be enforced in those cases.

Lazizbek Saidoripov, first deputy director of the Agency for Technical Regulation, said e-commerce is addressed specifically under Articles 18 and 19 of the law.

Online platforms will be required to remove prohibited or restricted goods, share information with authorized state bodies, respond to consumer complaints, and retain records and reviews of products sold. They will also be required to cooperate with market surveillance authorities when dangerous goods are identified.

"Even if a foreign e-commerce platform has no legal entity registered in Uzbekistan, it will be subject to the same rights and obligations when selling to our consumers," the agency representative said.

He said that once the bill is signed into law, market surveillance measures — including test purchases — could be applied to such platforms, with the goal of establishing uniform consumer-protection rules across both traditional and online retail.

The agency representative stressed that the product safety law is directly linked to, and complements, the market surveillance law considered earlier in the same session, noting that the concept of an "economic operator" should apply equally to traditional commerce and online marketplaces.