The new merger organization, GACI, created after the joining of the IAF and ILAC, is barely a few months old and already anxious to break international law. It’s as if the folks at GACI are genetically predisposed to do evil and corrupt shit, and cannot contain themselves.
If you recall, international sanctions were put on Russia after its invasion of Crimea in 2014. The IAF ignored that one, and then Russia was hit with tougher sanctions after its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In that case, the European Commission issued a directive to clarify that, yes, the sanctions applied to things like the ISO accreditation scheme, but IAF still wouldn’t budge and kept Russia in.
Finally, prompted in part by Oxebridge’s viral reporting and pressure from the public, IAF relented. Sort of. They ejected Russia from the IAF and issued a demand that member ABs stop accrediting in that country. The former was a paper tiger, and the latter was a scam by IAF’s then-Chair Emanuele Riva to grab the Russian market for his daytime employer, the Italian AB Accredia. So, in the end, the Chair of the IAF openly violated his own mandates, but no one did anything about it.
On paper, however, Russia was no longer an IAF member. ABs kept working in Russia, just without the IAF logo.
The new GACI, headed up by its new Chair Brahim Houla of Saudi Arabia — a country famous for its love of ethics and human rights (snort) — wants to go further in the “fuck you, international law” school of thought, and just added Russia back in. It was all very quiet, and there were no public notices (of course), but here’s the current listing of IAF signatories as of less than a month ago:
So what happened? Based on the standards that the two Russian bodies are accredited to, these would have fallen under ILAC previously, which was headed up by Israel’s Etty Feller. Now, Feller only cares about international law when it suits her home country, but gives no shits at all about anything happening farther than fifteen feet from her house, never mind in Russia. So I am guessing the ILAC side of the new GACI house fast-tracked the entry of Russia into the new organization, and the corrupt Houla had no problem with it.
So, it’s just a matter of time before we see the ISO 17011 bodies — who offer ISO 9001 and those certificates — added back in, too.
Bad news for Riva and his gang of mafiosos at Accredia, as he might have competition coming! But it’s always fun to watch criminals fight other criminals.
Meanwhile, the new GACI is registered in New Zealand, and they have some pretty hard sanctions against Russia, too. A quick search of the NZ sanctions doesn’t seem to prohibit accreditation in Russia outright, but they do cover companies that were previously certified under the IAF / ILAC scheme, like Gazprom and dozens of military and defense companies.
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
