By opposition to hard law, the term ‘soft law refers instruments that are non-legally binding and enforceable only to some degree. Unlike hard law, they are not adopted by a formal legislative process. Examples of soft law included decisions of G7 summits, action plan of world environmental conference or uniliteral act of a state, or gentlemen agreement between states. Soft law is usually associated with international law but can be use also in domestic law. International standards are deemed to be soft law instruments. There is an on-going debate on whether “soft law” is really law.
Published in Chapter:
Fostering the Participation of Companies in Standardization: A Soft Law Instrument to Reduce Risks – The Concept of Student Standardization Societies
Christophe Sene (CEN/TC-276, France)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 27
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-2181-6.ch010
Abstract
Standardization is one source of informal rules that regulate the public realm: standards are not legally-binding, but, as soft law instruments, they influence the governance, ethics, and conduct of companies. Standardization brings unique benefits to companies in term of knowledge, credibility, and risk reduction by bringing accountability and predictability. To foster active participation of companies in standardization, higher and continuous education in standardization is essential to build mutual understanding between companies and the standardization world since decision making in the former is a relatively quick top-down hierarchical process while in the latter time-consuming consensus-building is the norm. The concept of Student Standardization Societies (SSS) is introduced as the best way to promote standardization in the long term, and advice is given for the practical implementation of SSS and their relationship with Official Standardization Organizations.