Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates and experts,
Welcome to the ninth session of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Consumer Protection Law and Policy — the United Nations' annual forum on consumer protection.
Consumer protection, at its core, is about trust. Every day, people everywhere buy things — off a shelf or with a click — trusting that what they bring home is safe, and that it is what the seller promised. Our job is to make sure that trust is not misplaced. When it holds, markets work for people.
This year, we meet on the back of real progress. Let me make three points: on the products people bring home; on trust in the digital economy; and on the cooperation that both now demand.
I begin with product safety. Last December, the General Assembly adopted the first-ever United Nations Principles for Consumer Product Safety. This is what multilateralism looks like when it delivers: agreement, in a fractured moment, on something that reaches into every home.
Product safety is the toy a child chews on. The space heater a family runs through a cold night. The phone charger left plugged in while the house sleeps. A product is designed in one country, built in a second, and sold through a platform based in a third. When it turns out to be dangerous, the harm travels fast — and responsibility, evidence and jusridiction scatter across borders.
Our World Consumer Protection Map shows how far we have to go. Less than half the world's countries report legal coverage for product safety. Only 43 have experience cooperating crossborder on it.
The Principles close part of that gap. They give every country a common reference — for prevention, for market surveillance, for the recall of a dangerous product, for the take-down of a listing on an online marketplace, and for the alert that warns the next country before the same product arrives. Their worth will be measured in enforcement: in laws written, institutions built, corrective measures that actually bite. Your session this week on enforcement in global markets speaks directly to that.
This brings me to my second point: trust in the digital economy. Global e-commerce sales reached 28 trillion dollars in 2024, and the market keeps growing. That number rests on something fragile. People shop online only as long as they trust it, and for developing countries, that trust is the price of entry to the digital economy.
Trust depends on what a consumer can understand and check. Increasingly, algorithms and AI decide what people see, what they are offered, and at what price. The same tools that can spot a bad product can also steer a shopper toward a dangerous choice, or bury a warning three clicks deep. Environmental claims sometimes do the same to sustainability — vague "green" labels that leave people unable to tell a real choice from a marketing one. Only around 40 countries have consumer protection laws on sustainable consumption.
So consumers need information they can actually use — and rules with teeth behind it. Better information does not let businesses or public authorities off the hook. Governments set clear rules. Businesses tell the truth, on time. Enforcement authorities act when a claim is deceptive. Your work this week on consumer information and education goes straight to this.
That leads to my third and final point: cooperation. Consumer risks now cross borders as fast as the goods, the data and the payments that carry them. No authority, however capable, can do it alone.
Cooperation has to become part of everyday enforcement — shared alerts, joint investigations, redress that works across jurisdictions. This is where this Group does its most practical work. Over the next three days you will hear from the informal working groups on product safety, on electronic commerce, and on consumer protection and gender. Argentina will open its own system to a voluntary peer review — a frank assessment and exchange of experiences.. And UNCTAD will keep convening this work, and keep standing with you as you build it.
Excellencies,
Consumer protection is a foundation of inclusive and sustainable development. Safe products, honest markets, empowered consumers — this is how development reaches the household, and how we make good on the promise to leave no one behind.
Over these three days, hold one question in front of you: how do we build consumer protection systems that work for the markets we have today, and hold up against the ones coming tomorrow?
Let me thank every Member State, expert and consumer representative here.
I wish you a productive session. Thank you.