4. Areas covered by accreditation

4.1 What is accreditation?

To accredit means "to recognize officially, sanction, authorize, certify or guarantee the required standards", implying a certain "recognized level of authority, competence or excellence" (definition taken from the Collins English dictionary). We have no choice but to use such terms, since the term "accreditation" was first used for laboratories in standards texts whose reference language was, and still is, English.

Accreditation is a means of building confidence, enabling regulatory authorities, the market and society to assess whether testing laboratories, inspection or certification bodies (conformity assessment bodies) are performing defined tasks with the high level of reliability required.

As we have...