  Product safety has been a concern in Europe ever since the early 1960s.
Despite the long and relatively stable historical lineage of product safety
regulations, new technologies, changes in the world economy, and other major
transformations have in recent years brought product safety again to the
forefront of policy debates. As reforms are also underway, there is a
motivation to review the complex safety policy framework in the European Union
(EU). Thus, building on deliberative policy analysis and interpretative
literature review, this paper reviews the safety policy for non-food consumer
products in the EU. The review covers the historical background and the main
legislations, administration and enforcement of the policy, standardization and
harmonization, legislations enacted for specific products, notifications
delivered by national safety authorities to the EU's alert system, recalls of
dangerous consumer products, and the liability of these. Based on the review
and analysis of these themes and the associated literature, the current policy
challenges are further discussed.
