Between May 8 and 12, 2023, in Sydney, Australia, the annual ICPEN meeting took place, where international representatives of consumer protection agencies, experts and business actors, among others, met with the main objective of exchanging best practices on consumer protection issues.  

What is ICPEN?  

ICPEN is the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network, composed of more than 70 government consumer protection authorities, aiming to improve international cooperation by promoting the exchange of information and best practices. Currently, the presidency is held by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).   

SIC interventions during the event  

The Superintendence of Industry and Commerce (SIC), as a member of ICPEN, participated virtually in these events, presenting the results as coordinator of the Fraud Prevention Month, a worldwide campaign that addresses common issues to all international markets. The topic for this year was dark commercial patterns.   

Likewise, during the panel on innovations in consumer protection, together with authorities from the European Commission, the United States, Kenya and Portugal, an official from the National Network for Consumer Protection shared the important work carried out by the Network as an innovative mechanism for consumer protection at the national level.   

Finally, during the Consumer Education Awards 2023, which seek to highlight the key role played by ICPEN members in the field of consumer education, in order to recognize them for those great initiatives that encourage an informed consumer, the SIC was a finalist in the two categories: i) non-discrimination to consumers and ii) product safety strategies.  

In the first category (non-discrimination to consumers), aimed at recognizing the work of the authorities to raise awareness and educate consumers without any discrimination or stereotypes, the SIC competed with SIC Ancestral, a strategy whose objective is that ethnic and indigenous communities can better understand, from their language, their rights and duties as consumers. 

The second category (product safety strategies) focused on recognizing those authorities that have implemented original initiatives to educate consumers about the importance of product safety alert systems. In this case, the SIC competed with the Vehicle Safety Campaign 2022, developed within the framework of its presidency of the Consumer Safety and Health Network (CSHN) of the Organization of American States (OAS).