Product Safety
Safe Products Should Not Depend on Where You Live
Products now move globally with extraordinary ease. Consumer protection does not. This article examines what that gap means for families, governments, businesses and the people quietly working to make product safety real.
The world has built a global marketplace. It has not yet built an equally global system of protection.
In Chile, a small toy designed to hang from a child's stroller became the subject of a safety alert in April 2025.
It looked harmless: a pretend slice of avocado toast, with a mirror tomato, a piece of toy bacon and an egg intended for a baby to bite. But part of the toy could detach and create small pieces, raising a risk of choking or suffocation.
Chile's consumer authority, SERNAC, recorded 1,500 affected units. Five incidents had already been reported in the United States; in two of them, a baby had a detached piece in its mouth. No injuries were reported.
There is something important in that story beyond the toy itself. The danger was identified. An authority existed. Information moved. Families were warned.
That is what a safety system is supposed to do: identify the risk before an incident becomes an injury.
But not every consumer in the world lives behind the same system.
Regulations are written in capitals, ministries and conference rooms. Risk arrives much more quietly. It sits on a kitchen counter. It charges beside a bed. It hangs from a child's stroller.
And when something goes wrong, the first person affected is rarely thinking about international trade, regulatory capacity or market surveillance. They are thinking about someone they love.
The protection we rarely see
For many people living in highly regulated economies, the machinery behind an ordinary purchase is almost invisible.
Most of us do not meet the laboratory technician who tested a product, the customs officer who stopped another one at a border, the engineer who investigated a defect or the regulator who ordered a recall before somebody was hurt.
We simply open the box. That confidence is a form of privilege.
You should not need to understand testing, customs controls, standards, recall procedures or international regulatory cooperation before buying a toaster or a child's toy. Somebody else is supposed to worry about those things.
But the protection surrounding that ordinary act of purchase is not evenly distributed.
UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) estimates that 44 per cent of United Nations Member States still lack adequate legal frameworks for consumer product safety.
That figure should not be read as evidence that governments do not care. Many countries are simultaneously trying to strengthen healthcare, education, infrastructure, food security, employment, border controls and public administration with limited resources.
Product safety requires laws, inspectors, laboratories, information systems, technical expertise and functioning institutions. Those things take time to build.
Products do not wait.
A lithium battery, connected toy, electrical appliance or cosmetic can cross continents in days. Global commerce can now move products across borders faster and in vastly greater numbers than traditional safety systems were designed to inspect individually.
Europe itself illustrates the scale of that challenge. EU customs authorities dealt with almost 5.9 billion low-value e-commerce packages in 2025, up from 4.6 billion the year before. When authorities looked more closely, the findings were uncomfortable.
In an EU-wide operation involving all 27 Member States, authorities checked 20,040 toys and small electronic products bought online from outside the Union.
Sixty-four per cent failed to comply with EU rules.
Among 659 products selected for laboratory testing, 534 were confirmed as non-compliant or dangerous around 81 per cent with risks including choking, electric shock, hazardous chemicals and asphyxiation.
This happened inside one of the world's most developed regulatory environments. That matters because it removes the comfortable idea that unsafe products are primarily somebody else's problem.
No country has solved this. Some simply have stronger defences than others.
There is no single global consumer
A parent in Paris may buy a toy through a large online marketplace. A family in Nairobi may buy an electrical appliance from a neighbourhood retailer. Someone in Lima may discover a cosmetic through social media. A consumer in Dhaka may buy a replacement battery through an informal market. Another family may buy a second-hand product because buying new is not economically realistic.
The routes are different. Household incomes are different. The institutions surrounding the purchase may be radically different.
But the human body exposed to an electric shock, chemical, fire or choking hazard is not different.
There is no single global consumer. Increasingly, however, there is a global marketplace.
That mismatch becomes more important when inequality enters the picture. For an affluent household, replacing a defective low-cost appliance may be irritating. For another family, losing the same amount may represent a meaningful portion of weekly income.
An injury where healthcare is readily accessible has one economic consequence. The same injury where treatment must be paid directly by the family may have another. A recall has limited value if the consumer never hears about it. A legal right offers limited protection if there is no realistic route to enforce it.
Unsafe products therefore do more than create physical danger. They can amplify existing inequality.
The world may be divided by borders, income and institutions. But there is nothing local about the value of a human life.
A parent does not experience a choking hazard differently because the toy was bought in another currency. A burn does not become less painful because the country where it happened has fewer inspectors. And a family does not value a child differently because its government has fewer laboratories.
What happens when one market says no?
There is another part of this story that receives far less attention: a dangerous product removed from one market does not necessarily disappear.
UNCTAD has warned that products withdrawn because of safety non-compliance can be exported to jurisdictions where the same problem has not yet been assessed or acted upon. The issue was serious enough for UNCTAD's member states to adopt an international recommendation specifically aimed at preventing the cross-border distribution of known unsafe consumer products.
The border, in that situation, does not eliminate the risk.
It can simply move it to somebody else.
That raises an uncomfortable question: if a manufacturer, distributor or trader knows that a product has been judged unsafe in one market, what responsibility follows that knowledge when the product moves elsewhere?
The legal answer will vary from country to country. The ethical answer is harder to compartmentalise.
The marketplace changed the problem
E-commerce has brought enormous benefits. It has expanded choice, opened international markets to smaller businesses and made products available to communities that previously had limited access to them.
But it has also changed the mechanics of product safety.
Traditional systems were largely built around identifiable manufacturers, importers, distributors and retailers operating through visible commercial channels.
Modern commerce can be far harder to map. A consumer may buy directly from a seller thousands of kilometres away. A product may travel individually in a small parcel. The marketplace facilitating the sale may be headquartered elsewhere. The manufacturer may be difficult to identify. The seller may disappear. Millions of similar transactions can happen at the same time.
UNCTAD cites an OECD study finding that 87 per cent of recalled or banned products examined in a global review remained available online. A recall in the physical world does not automatically erase a digital listing.
Online marketplaces are no longer simply electronic shop windows. Their systems rank sellers, recommend products, promote listings, facilitate payment and place goods before consumers with extraordinary precision.
That creates another legitimate question: if a platform can identify what a consumer is likely to buy within seconds, what level of responsibility should accompany that capability when the product itself may be unsafe?
Europe is already wrestling with this. In May 2026, the European Commission fined Temu €200 million under the Digital Services Act after finding that it had failed to adequately assess systemic risks associated with illegal products on its marketplace. The Commission said its investigation found a very high percentage of selected chargers failed basic safety tests and a high percentage of tested baby toys posed medium-to-high safety risks.
The details belong to Europe. The underlying problem does not.
Something important happened at the United Nations
Against this background, a major international development passed with relatively little public attention.
On 15 December 2025, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the first United Nations Principles for Consumer Product Safety.
For the first time, governments had agreed a global framework dedicated specifically to strengthening protection against unsafe products.
The principles call for safe products whether sold online or offline. They recognise the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged consumers and countries with less-developed safety systems. They also state that businesses bear primary responsibility for product safety throughout the lifecycle.
But principles do not inspect a toy. They do not test a battery. They do not stop a dangerous electrical product at a border. They do not contact a family and tell them that something purchased months earlier has been recalled.
People and institutions do those things.
So perhaps the most important question begins after the principles have been agreed: how does a global expectation become protection that actually reaches people?
The people who make protection real
Behind every functioning safety system are people most consumers will never meet: the customs officer who opens a suspicious parcel, the laboratory specialist who tests a toy, the engineer who traces a defect and the inspector who visits a warehouse.
There are also the regulators who order recalls, public servants trying to strengthen national laws, and international teams building practical tools such as the UNCTAD consumer-product-safety handbook.
Their work is rarely visible when it succeeds. Often, success simply means that nothing happens.
A dangerous product does not reach a child. A faulty charger does not start a fire. A warning arrives before an injury.
UNCTAD and the European Commission are co-developing the first UNCTAD Handbook on Consumer Product Safety as part of the EC-UNCTAD Handbook and Training on Consumer Product Safety project, aimed particularly at helping developing and least-developed countries strengthen national frameworks and institutional capability.
During International Product Safety Week in Brussels on 7 September 2026, the European Commission and UNCTAD convened their seventh joint workshop under the theme “Global Product Safety in action: Bringing the UN Principles on Consumer Product Safety to life.” The programme included expertise from several regions, including Thailand, Chile and Rwanda.
That cooperation matters because a handbook can share knowledge, training can build expertise, and international principles can establish direction.
None of those things alone, however, can create an adequately funded regulator, build a laboratory, employ inspectors or construct a functioning recall system.
Governments still have to build institutions. Industry still has to behave responsibly. Platforms still have to decide how much responsibility should accompany the extraordinary power they have acquired over global retail. Countries with mature regulatory systems also have to consider how effectively their safety intelligence travels beyond their own borders.
Making ordinary life safe requires an extraordinary amount of cooperation. The challenge is extending more of that protection to people who do not yet benefit from it.
The corporate question
Global businesses should also be prepared to answer a difficult question: should a customer receive a materially lower level of safety protection simply because the country in which they live requires less?
This does not mean every product must be identical everywhere. Markets legitimately differ. Electrical systems differ. Climates differ. Languages, certifications and technical requirements differ.
Those legitimate differences should not be confused with knowingly withholding safety-relevant information or applying weaker protective practices simply because local law allows it.
A manufacturer that has learned of a serious safety risk in one country does not lose that knowledge when the product crosses another border.
A company capable of monitoring incidents in one major market does not become technically incapable of doing so elsewhere.
A business able to warn customers, update software or trace affected products in a highly regulated jurisdiction should at least ask what equivalent responsibility follows its product into markets with weaker infrastructure.
The issue is not identical regulation everywhere. It is whether safety-relevant knowledge should travel with the product.
The law establishes minimum obligations. Leadership determines what happens when the law is silent.
Governments still matter
Corporations cannot solve this alone.
Neither can the United Nations.
Neither can the European Commission.
Product safety ultimately depends on functioning national institutions. Governments need laws appropriate to their markets. Authorities need powers to intervene. Inspectors need expertise. Laboratories need capability.
Customs agencies need intelligence. Consumers need somewhere to report a dangerous product. Warnings and recalls need to reach the population.
This should increasingly be understood as part of economic infrastructure.
Safe markets protect people and legitimate businesses from those who cut corners. They create confidence in trade and become more important, not less, as economies digitise.
The objective is not to make every country identical, but to make fewer people vulnerable simply because of where they happen to live.
Ordinary people still have a role
Consumers should never become the world's unpaid product inspectors. Responsibility belongs first with those who design, manufacture, import, sell and regulate products.
But awareness still matters.
Before buying a safety-critical product from an unfamiliar seller, it is reasonable to ask whether the manufacturer can actually be identified.
If an electrical product begins swelling, overheating, smelling unusual or behaving unpredictably, that should not simply be dismissed as inconvenience.
Where recall systems exist, consumers can use them. When a dangerous product is discovered, reporting it rather than quietly discarding it may help protect somebody else. For connected products, software and firmware updates can sometimes address security or safety weaknesses.
These actions cannot compensate for weak institutions.
Consumers can reduce risk. They cannot replace regulators, laboratories, responsible businesses or functioning governments.
Somewhere tonight, a parent may take a toy away from a child because something does not look right.
Somewhere else, another parent may never know that the same product has already been recalled thousands of kilometres away.
The difference between those two families should not be information that stopped at a border.
What happens next
Europe is continuing to rethink its own architecture.
The European Commission is preparing a European Product Act intended to update the EU's framework of product rules, market-surveillance and compliance rules, and standardisation. The Commission's implementation tracker currently lists the initiative for Q3 2026, although the timing is expressly indicative.
A leaked draft reported by Euronews on 10 September points towards some of the questions being considered in Brussels, including stronger marketplace accountability, a market-surveillance fee and more centralised enforcement. Those provisions may change before any formal proposal appears.
Their significance lies less in the detail than in what they reveal: even sophisticated regulatory systems are having to redesign themselves around a marketplace that has already changed.
The challenge for the rest of the world is therefore not simply to copy Europe. Europe itself is still adapting.
The UN Principles offer a global direction. The handbook and training work can help build capability.
National governments can strengthen institutions. Responsible companies can carry safety knowledge across borders. Online marketplaces can use technology not only to sell products more efficiently, but to identify risk more effectively. Consumers can be given better information without being asked to police global trade themselves.
None of this will happen overnight, but the work has begun. And the measure of success will not ultimately be another resolution, conference, regulation or handbook. It will be much simpler.
A parent buys a toy. Someone plugs in a charger. A teenager uses a cosmetic. A worker puts on protective equipment. A family replaces a battery.
And nobody is hurt.
Tomorrow, somewhere in the world, someone will open a cardboard box containing a product made thousands of kilometres away.
They probably will not know which regulator has jurisdiction over it. They will not know whether it was inspected at the border. They may not know who manufactured it. They certainly will not have read the United Nations Principles for Consumer Product Safety.
Nor should they need to.
The purpose of a functioning safety system is that ordinary people should not require expertise in international regulation simply to buy an ordinary product safely.
But until protection travels as easily as products do, awareness matters. So does the continued work of governments, regulators, companies, marketplaces and international institutions to build something the global economy still does not fully possess: a world in which the safety surrounding a product does not depend primarily on the strength of the institutions surrounding the person who happens to buy it.
A product may cross a border.
The person on the other side may speak another language, earn another income, worship differently, live under another legal system and call another place home.
They may seem very far away.
But they worry about their children. They protect the people they love. They feel pain. They place trust in the things they bring into their homes.
In those things, distance disappears.
The world may be divided by borders, income and institutions. But there is nothing local about the value of a human life.
Sources and references
The analysis in this article draws on official regulatory, institutional and public-policy sources.
1. SERNAC — Fisher-Price stroller toy safety alert
Servicio Nacional del Consumidor, 21 April 2025. Source for the Chile opening case: 1,500 affected units, five reported incidents in the United States, two involving a detached piece in a baby’s mouth, and no reported injuries.
2. UNCTAD — Emerging trends and challenges in consumer product safety
Source for the estimate that 44 per cent of UN Member States lack sufficient legal frameworks to ensure product safety.
3. European Commission — E-commerce: product compliance and safety
Source for the 5.9 billion low-value e-commerce packages handled in 2025, the EU-wide checks of 20,040 toys and small electronic products, the 64 per cent non-compliance rate, and the laboratory findings showing 534 of 659 products — around 81 per cent — confirmed as non-compliant or dangerous.
4. UNCTAD — Consumer product safety: new global principles adopted at UN
Relevant to the article’s discussion of global product-safety governance, business responsibility and the growing challenge of unsafe products in cross-border and digital markets.
5. UNCTAD — Recommendation on preventing cross-border distribution of known unsafe consumer products
Source for the section examining what happens when a product judged unsafe in one jurisdiction moves into another market.
6. European Commission — Commission fines Temu €200 million for breaching the Digital Services Act
European Commission, 28 May 2026. Source for the €200 million Temu fine and the Commission’s findings concerning systemic risks from illegal products, including unsafe chargers and baby toys.
7. UNCTAD — United Nations Principles for Consumer Product Safety
The first global United Nations framework dedicated specifically to consumer product safety, adopted in December 2025. It covers products sold online and offline, vulnerable and disadvantaged consumers, countries with less-developed product-safety frameworks, and primary business responsibility throughout the product lifecycle.
8. UNCTAD — Handbook and training on consumer product safety
Official project page for the EC–UNCTAD Handbook and Training on Consumer Product Safety, focused particularly on strengthening frameworks in developing and least-developed countries.
9. UNCTAD — 7th EU–UNCTAD workshop on consumer product safety
7 September 2026, Brussels and online. Official page for the workshop “Global Product Safety in action: Bringing the UN Principles on Consumer Product Safety to life.”
10. Euronews — EU Commission eyes major import overhaul to crack down on illegal Chinese products
10 September 2026. Reporting on the leaked European Product Act draft, including proposed online-marketplace liability, a market-surveillance fee and more centralised enforcement. As stated in the article, these were reported draft provisions rather than settled law.
Editorial note
Where the European Commission page presents both a narrative percentage and underlying laboratory counts, this article uses the underlying published data: 534 of 659 products, equivalent to approximately 81 per cent.
One precision point: UNCTAD’s public Principles page says the General Assembly adopted the Principles on 15 December 2025, while another UNCTAD legal-instruments page lists Resolution 80/119 as 16 December 2025. For consistency with UNCTAD’s dedicated Principles page and your locked article, I would retain 15 December 2025 in the article.