Minister Rozeta Hajdari said that the International Consumer Week includes everyone, highlighting MIET’s special obligation to be as responsive as possible to consumer needs and to push forward the sound interests of consumer.
Meanwhile, the head of the Consumer Protection Council, Mrs. Safete Rexhepi emphasized the increased percentage of complaints, which reflects the citizens' trust in our institutions.
Below is the full speech of Minister Rozeta Hajdari:
Dear media representatives,
Thank you for responding to our call to broadcast this conference, in which we will talk about the International Consumer Week.
These days we are marking the International Consumer Week, which by definition, includes all of us.
The Ministry of Industry, Entrepreneurship and Trade has a special obligation to be alert to the needs of the consumer and to push forward their sound interests.
Our goals are to create a commercial, serving and consuming environment with non-excessive prices, with the safest possible quality, with the possibility of making informed consumer choices, with non-inferior products, etc., because otherwise, we risk their money to be squandered, their health, safety and national interest to be threatened.
In order to promote the most complete realization of consumer rights, as soon as we gained the right to govern, we saw it necessary to develop a wide range of adequate legal and practical actions.
To strengthen the rights of the consumer, we have adopted a series of laws and Administrative Instructions, which have a direct impact on the protection and care of consumers.
The Law on Protection of Competition, the Law on Trademarks, the Law on Inspections, and several other laws approved last year have strengthened the legal regulatory aspect. MIET has also issued several Administrative Instructions, in the framework of customer care, among them also being the Regulation on the Prices of Petroleum Products and Renewable Fuels and other protective measures, which regulates ceiling prices. We have also sent to the Parliament of Kosovo the Law on Temporary Measures of Basic Products in special cases of market destabilization, which, inter alia, would enable setting the maximum allowed prices for essential products, but which has been blocked as a result of one of the opposition political parties (LDK) sending it to the Constitutional Court of Kosovo.
Based on the Law on Consumer Protection, we have also approved the 2021-2025 Consumer Protection Program in the Government and undertaken concrete actions in the field. The vision of the program is empowered, secure and confident consumers in a fair and competitive market, where they can participate actively, exercising their rights and the power of well-informed choice in the purchase of goods and services.
In order to improve the quality of services, it is the priority of MIET to empower consumers in the Republic of Kosovo, protect their economic interests, the issue of safety, choice, quality, price, variety, availability, etc., and to offer consumers contemporary supervision and transparency of the market, as well as protect them effectively from risks which they cannot handle and solve individually.
Consumer empowerment is not only a right, but is also related to creating a general environment that enables them to exercise these rights and benefit from them, which means creating a system in which they can rely on.
The program contains the priorities as well as the adequate measures, which, at certain stages of its implementation, must be undertaken with dedication by the whole society with the aim of further development and advancement of achievements, consequently successes, in the plan of establishing constitutional and legal obligations.
Within this concept, the basic principles on which consumer protection policies are built and implemented in the European Union, the fundamental rights of consumers, gradually and over time, have been extended to many platforms, such as:
1. Right to protect the life, health, environment and economic interests of the consumer;
2. Right to consumer information and education;
3. Right to represent their interests;
4. Right to organize in consumer associations to protect their interests;
5. Right to complain;
6. Right to legal protection;
7. Right to compensation, in certain cases also to seek redressal;
8. Right to use public services;
9. Right to receive services in a language understandable to the consumer.
Since we are all consumers, these actions that are in the interest of consumers are in the interest of all of us. Improvement at the highest level has increased and they affect a few areas, in strengthening our free competitive economy, our standard of life, health and higher ethical models of business conduct.
Dear media representatives, allow me to wish you Happy Consumer Days and thank you for your cooperation and following the activities of the Ministry of Industry, Entreneruship and Trade.
