EU MSR Article 4 responsible economic operator duties

Start with the product and the applicable Union harmonisation legislation. Article 4 has applied since 16 July 2021. The consolidated text dated 23 May 2024 includes the Batteries Regulation and specified permanent-magnet duties under the Critical Raw Materials Act in Article 4(5), alongside the established product regimes. Another product act can also make Article 4 applicable. Do not assign an Article 4 responsible economic operator merely because a product is sold in the EU.

When Article 4 applies, the eligible EU-established operator is one of four roles: an EU manufacturer; an importer where the manufacturer is not established in the Union; an authorised representative with a written mandate for the Article 4(3) tasks; or, only where none of those operators is established in the Union, an EU fulfilment service provider for the products it handles. A fulfilment service provider must commercially provide at least two of warehousing, packaging, addressing, and dispatching without owning the product; postal, parcel-delivery, and freight-transport services are excluded.

Article 4(4) requires the name, registered trade name or registered trade mark, and contact details including postal address of the Article 4 economic operator to be indicated on the product, packaging, parcel, or an accompanying document.

The Commission guidance treats a postal address as mandatory for the contact display. A website may be useful as extra contact information, but it does not supersede the postal address. For imports, check this before release for free circulation because missing or false Article 4 details can trigger customs suspension and market-surveillance follow-up.

For products whose applicable Union harmonisation law requires an EU declaration of conformity or declaration of performance and technical documentation, the Article 4 operator must verify those documents have been drawn up. It must keep the declaration available to market surveillance authorities for the period required by the sector legislation and ensure the technical documentation can be made available on request.

The Article 4 operator does not always need to hold the full technical file itself, but it needs a working route to obtain it or have it provided to the authority. Fulfilment service providers should not accept the role without practical arrangements with the client or manufacturer for declarations, technical documentation access, and corrective-action support.

Article 4 cooperation is product-specific: after a reasoned request from a market surveillance authority, the Article 4 operator must provide information and documentation needed to demonstrate conformity in a language easily understood by the authority, inform authorities when it has reason to believe the product presents a risk, and cooperate so immediate necessary corrective action is taken or the risk is mitigated.

Article 7 adds a broader cooperation duty for economic operators regarding actions that could eliminate or mitigate risks from products they made available on the market. It also requires information society service providers to cooperate, at an authority's request and in specific cases, to support action for products offered online through their services.

For each SKU or product family, keep the Article 4 check close to the listing, import, and fulfilment workflow. The practical question is whether the units entering or being made available in the Union have a qualifying EU operator whose details travel with the product and whose document route works when an authority asks.

Do not use Article 4 to blur roles. A seller may still have obligations under sector law or other product-safety rules, but for Article 4 it must fit one of the eligible operator categories or ensure that another eligible EU operator is in place. Repeat the check after a product-law amendment, model or manufacturer change, new importer, changed authorised-representative mandate, fulfilment move, or new EU-targeted sales route.