Article 21 of the Saudi Product Safety Law

This article imposes a duty of professional confidentiality on accepted bodies, meaning conformity assessment bodies that the Authority has accepted under the Law and regulations.

• What is covered: the facts, practices and information they learn.
• Where it comes from: what they learn through the tasks assigned to them within the scope of acceptance.

In practice this duty matters because, during testing, inspection and certification, conformity assessment bodies see sensitive information held by companies, such as product composition, manufacturing methods and technical documents. Their confidentiality duty encourages economic operators to provide the information required without fear that it will leak.

The text ties confidentiality to "the tasks assigned to them within the scope of acceptance", so it covers what they learn because of their work as an accepted body. The article does not set a specific penalty for a body that breaches confidentiality.

It is preceded by Article 20, which allows the competent authorities to use conformity assessment bodies accepted by the Authority, and followed by Article 22, which prevents accepted bodies from imposing conformity assessment procedures other than those in the technical regulations and requires them to stay within the scope of acceptance when providing their services.