General requirements
Évolutions of the standard ISO/IEC 17025:2017

Impartiality, which took up little space in the previous version, is now the subject of the first chapter of requirements.

First of all, it is important to distinguish impartiality from confidentiality, which is the subject of the second chapter of the standard's requirements. The notion of impartiality consists in providing an objective result; it implies either the absence of any conflict of interest, or, where conflicts of interest exist, the implementation of measures to reduce the resulting risks to impartiality.

There can be many sources of conflict of interest. For example: internal pressure on personnel, intimidation by the customer or one of his representatives, fear of losing a customer or a job, involvement...