WELMEC was created by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at a meeting in Bern in June 1990. Eighteen countries in the European Community and EFTA have signed the original MoU, which set out objectives and tasks for WELMEC and identified rights and obligations arising from membership. Since 1990, several countries have joined WELMEC as Associate Members, one of a number of developments not foreseen when WELMEC was formed. To reflect these changes, and following extensive discussion during 1998 and 1999, a number of amendments to the MoU were agreed by the WELMEC Committee at its meeting in Warsaw in September 1999.
The MoU is of an exclusively recommendatory nature, however, and does not in any way bind its signatories. WELMEC remains a free cooperation in which agreement is sought on a range of issues of mutual interest and wide importance. The full text of the MoU is given in Annex 1 and the signatories are listed in Annex 2.
(WELMEC was originally established as the Western European Legal Metrology Cooperation. In 1995 with the decision to accept Associate Members from among Central and East European countries the title was changed to European Cooperation in Legal Metrology, but the acronym was retained).
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Country specific information on weights and measures
Objectives
The principal aim of WELMEC is to establish a harmonised and consistent approach to European legal metrology in the light of a number of important developments:
Accumulated experience of the operation of the non-automatic weighing instruments Directive (90/384/EEC);
Prolonged discussion of proposals for a measuring instruments Directive;
The progress of a number of applicant countries towards EU membership;
Increasing international trade in measuring instruments and measured goods;
The different coverage of legal metrology in various countries.
To support this aim, the following objectives are listed in the WELMEC Memorandum of Understanding:
i.to develop and maintain mutual confidence between legal metrology services in Europe;
ii.to achieve and maintain the equivalence and harmonisation of legal metrology activities taking into account the relevant guidelines;
iii.to identify any special features of legal metrology which need to be reflected in the European metrology, certification and testing framework;
iv.to organise the exchange of information for legal metrology applied at national and local level;
v.to identify, and promote the removal of, technical or administrative barriers to trade in the field of measuring instruments;
vi.to promote consistency of interpretation and application of normative documents and propose actions to facilitate implementation;
vii.to identify specific technical problems which might form the subject of collaborative projects;
viii.to maintain working links with all relevant bodies and promote the infrastructure relating to harmonisation of legal metrology;
ix.to debate trends and establish criteria for the scope of legal metrology and maintain channels for a continuous flow of knowledge.
