UN Guidelines research

With support from IDRC, Consumers International and its partners will be undertaking research to support our campaign for amendments to the United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection. Our strategy is to focus on the countries of India, Brazil and South Africa through partnerships with the following member/partners:

• Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore (India)
• IDEC (Brazil)
• Dr Tobias Schonwetter and Pria Chetty in (TBC) cooperation with National Consumer Forum (South Africa)

With additional contributions and guidance from consumer policy expert Robin Brown of Australia, these core partners will contribute research papers which will form chapters of a background paper which covers all of the proposed additions to the Guidelines, incorporating primary and secondary sources (including the bibliography for the amendments themselves, as well as CI's previous research on A2K access barriers).

Alongside the core partners, other CI members will contribute specific case studies to the treatment of particular sections of the amendments in the background paper.

Our core partners will also take the lead in presenting their research and liaising with their national governments with a view to having those governments support the amendments within the UN system. Their experiences will also feed into a resource manual, for which Robin Brown will be primarily responsible, providing guidance on UN-level consumer advocacy.

Working documents

• Guidelines with A2K amendments (PDF format)
• Guidelines with A2K amendments (annotated HTML format)
• Provisional summary timeline for overall project
• Accepted project proposal to IDRC