Head of International Product Compliance and Product Liability, Cooley
Rod Freeman is an International Products Lawyer. He is routinely ranked as a leading product litigation lawyer in the major legal directories, where he is described as “the outstanding go-to specialist for product liability matters”, “without a shadow of a doubt the most knowledgeable... Read More →
Senior Vice President, Product Innovation & Industry Engagement, Sedgwick
Chris Harvey serves as President of the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization (ICPHSO), where he provides leadership for the organization's global mission of advancing consumer product safety through collaboration, education, and the exchange of best practices among regulators... Read More →
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:10am - 10:30am CEST
Microplastics is no longer just an issue for the environment. Clear evidence is emerging that release of micro and nano plastics from household and personal products is hazardous to human health. Public awareness is growing quickly, yet it is not necessarily on the consumer product sector's radar.
With the prevalence of plastic, consumer product manufacturers and sellers need to review all their merchandise for ways of minimising microplastic exposure.
It's a very widespread risk, but consumers can reduce their exposure through good product choice. This requires consumer education and shifts in product design.
This session will demonstrate the nature of the hazard and flag measures to address the risk of exposure through consumer products.
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:10am - 10:30am CEST
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:50am - 11:30am CEST
This ICPHSO panel examines how the EU Product Liability Directive (EU 2024/2853) reshapes manufacturer obligations for digital products, including social media, gaming, and AI systems. The Directive broadens the concept of a “product” to include software and recognizes psychological and behavioral harm as relevant to defectiveness, emphasizing that warnings alone cannot render a product safe. The session explores how specific design features may contribute to dependency-related behaviors, particularly among adolescents, and how such risks may be framed in litigation as foreseeable and design-driven. The panel highlights the role of human factors methods in identifying and assessing these risks, linking scientific evidence on digital use patterns to product design decisions. It also addresses emerging litigation theories, evidentiary considerations, and how companies can develop defensible hazard assessment frameworks to evaluate risk, document design intent, and align safety practices with evolving legal expectations.
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:50am - 11:30am CEST
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:50am - 11:30am CEST
Product safety enforcement is evolving rapidly across the globe. In the UK, proposals for a new single enforcement toolkit and novel penalty regimes signal a step-change in regulatory ambition. In the EU, moves towards centralised enforcement and tools such as the Customs Data Hub are reshaping the landscape for businesses operating across borders. Meanwhile, at a global level, important questions remain, including: which current enforcement regimes work well and which don't, do regulators have what they need or do we need new powers, better funding, more political support?
This session will bring together a range of representatives from regulator to business to consumer organisations to examine what effective enforcement looks like in practice. Interactive audience polling will ensure an engaging and lively exchange.
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:50am - 11:30am CEST
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:50am - 11:30am CEST
The proposed panel will delve into safety challenges of non-food products placed on the EU market:
1. How will the new EU Rapid Alert System impact manufacturers placing products onto the EU market? 2. How can manufacturers comply and place safe electrical, electronic and apparel products onto the market? 3. Overview of product safety regulations, standards and regulator’s expectations. 4. Corrective measures. 5. How will increased safety regulatory scrutiny support the Circular Economy.
Thursday September 10, 2026 10:50am - 11:30am CEST
Thursday September 10, 2026 11:35am - 12:15pm CEST
The rapid growth of e-commerce and online marketplaces has transformed the consumer product safety landscape. Unsafe and recalled products can now spread across borders rapidly, reappear online after removal, and evade traditional enforcement approaches. Regulators, researchers, and consumer organisations are increasingly exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help identify unsafe products online more quickly and effectively.
This session examines emerging initiatives using AI to support digital market surveillance, online product monitoring, and recall effectiveness. Speakers will discuss practical applications including web crawling, image recognition, automated risk detection, identification of recalled products on online marketplaces, and analysis of consumer complaints and safety alerts. The session will explore both the opportunities and limitations of AI tools, including issues of accuracy, governance, transparency, and international cooperation.
Attendees will gain insight into how AI may help advance a more effective global baseline for consumer product safety in digital markets.
Thursday September 10, 2026 11:35am - 12:15pm CEST
As global supply chains grow ever more complex and e-commerce enables the near-instantaneous distribution of goods across borders, the systems that we rely upon to keep consumers safe face unprecedented challenges.
This panel brings together regulators and industry leaders to examine how scale simultaneously amplifies risk and creates opportunity: from data-driven risk assessment and AI-powered horizon scanning to the challenge of maintaining coherent oversight when millions of consumer products cross borders daily.
Regulatory frameworks are proliferating — yet diverging — with the EU, UK, and US each pursuing distinct approaches to market surveillance, online marketplace accountability, and the integration of artificial intelligence into both manufacturing processes and enforcement tools.
Delegates will leave with a sharper understanding of where international cooperation is advancing, where critical gaps remain, and how the profession must adapt to safeguard consumers in an era of extraordinary commercial velocity.
Online marketplaces have an important role to play to facilitate businesses that sell their products via their platform. Providers of online marketplaces must obtain details of certain public registers and self-certification of compliance under Article 30 of the Digital Services Act Regulation (EU) 2022/2065. The Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 and Packaging & Packaging Waste Regulation (EU) 2025/40) clarifies that this includes Batteries and Packaging EPR registers and self-certified compliance with same.
Separately the DSA contains further obligations for designing on online marketplace to enable sellers to comply with providing compliance information and carry out best efforts to assess this has been done. Compliance information could potentially extend to other environmental requirements.
At this session, an expert panel will explore the EPR and other environmental requirements for distance sellers and the role of online marketplaces in facilitating compliance.
The product safety industry has a timing problem. Most quality interventions happen too late — at finished goods inspection, at the port, or worse, after a recall. This session makes the case for a fundamental shift: embedding safety thinking earlier, at design, material sourcing, and supplier onboarding — before problems become expensive. But shifting left only works if the burden doesn't simply transfer onto suppliers without the tools or visibility to act. Drawing on real supply chain data and AI-powered quality intelligence, this session explores what genuine upstream safety looks like — from pre-production testing gates to supplier-led data collection and proactive risk identification. Attendees will leave with a framework for making product safety a design decision, not a last-minute check.
The adoption of the UN Principles for Consumer Product Safety is a landmark moment. For the first time, a global framework affirms every consumer’s right to safe, non-hazardous products, and places clear responsibility on businesses across the entire product lifecycle.
But principles do not act. People do.
The distance between a global safety framework and a safe product in a consumer’s hands is almost always a human distance, a difficult conversation avoided, a decision made too quickly under pressure, a team culture that punishes challenge, a leader who could not hold the room during a crisis. These are not failures of policy. They are failures of human behaviour. And no regulation, however well-crafted, can fully close them.
The question this session asks is not “do we have the right principles?,” we do. The question is, do we have the human conditions to make them work?
The concept of a global baseline for product safety has long been discussed, but recent developments are making it feel more real than ever. The UN Principles for Consumer Product Safety, the EU's General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR), Digital Product Passports (DPP), and the U.S. CPSC e-Filing mandate all point toward a new era of connected product safety governance.
But are these systems truly converging? Or are businesses simply managing a growing set of interconnected yet still fragmented regulatory obligations?
Through interactive discussion and live audience polling, this session brings together regulators, industry practitioners, and technical experts to move beyond regulatory summaries and focus on what implementation actually looks like — data governance, supply chain traceability, post-market surveillance, and building scalable digital compliance systems that work across borders.
This session examines the persistent gap between globally recognized product safety risks and the uneven capacity to implement effective control measures across jurisdictions, with particular attention to Latin America as a revealing context. Building on the recent adoption of the United Nations Principles for Consumer Product Safety, it proposes the development of a voluntary global standard of good practices designed to translate high-level principles into operational, verifiable actions by market actors.
At the core of the proposal is a certification-based framework, complemented by a product safety ombudsman function and a cross-border dispute resolution mechanism, all supported by a multi-stakeholder governance structure. Through an expert-led, interactive discussion, the session will explore how such an instrument could enhance compliance, strengthen coordination among regulators, industry, and consumer organizations, and ultimately improve consumer protection in increasingly interconnected markets.
The UN General Assembly’s landmark adoption of the first-ever UN Principles for Consumer Product Safety makes clear that businesses bear primary responsibility for product safety across the entire product lifecycle—not merely where a specific mandatory rule exists. Yet manufacturers and retailers operating in today’s global economy routinely face regulatory silence: no applicable standard, no product-specific mandate, or irreconcilable requirements across jurisdictions. This session confronts that challenge head-on. Drawing on expertise from various corners of industry—including labs, global retail and consumer advocacy groups—panelists will explore how to identify sound scientific proxies in the absence of standards; how to approach safety for emerging and unregulated technologies; how multinational companies can navigate divergent regulatory regimes; and why a proactive safety program is both a business imperative and a moral one. The goal: a practical framework for advancing safety even when the rulebook is less than clear.
Head of International Product Compliance and Product Liability, Cooley
Rod Freeman is an International Products Lawyer. He is routinely ranked as a leading product litigation lawyer in the major legal directories, where he is described as “the outstanding go-to specialist for product liability matters”, “without a shadow of a doubt the most knowledgeable... Read More →
Senior Vice President, Product Innovation & Industry Engagement, Sedgwick
Chris Harvey serves as President of the International Consumer Product Health and Safety Organization (ICPHSO), where he provides leadership for the organization's global mission of advancing consumer product safety through collaboration, education, and the exchange of best practices among regulators... Read More →
