TRA promotes protection of consumers' interest

The Guidelines will assist consumers and licensed operators in understanding their rights and obligations when buying or selling telecommunications services.

The Consumer Protection Guidelines intend to clarify TRA's expectations with regard to how licensed operators should respect and protect consumer rights, encourage best practices to promote the provision of high quality services, and increase awareness of consumer rights.

These Guidelines provide recommendations on the acceptable practices on relations between telecommunications service providers and consumers, including such topics as encouraging consumer choice, information collection, consumer complaints handling, telemarketing, privacy of information, billing, tariffs and safety of consumers.

Commenting on issuing the guidelines, TRA's Manager of Consumer Affairs, Mrs. Ghada AlQassab, said:

"TRA has a responsibility under the Telecommunications Law for supervising the telecommunications sector with the aim to protect interests of consumers. As one step in achieving this, TRA is issuing these Guidelines as a discussion paper. Once the Guidelines are adopted, TRA will consider implementing some mandatory regulatory measures and policies, further enhancing protection of consumer rights."

Mrs. AlQassab went farther to say, "These measures will also facilitate access of consumers to information they require to make informed choices, and assist in maximizing the benefits from the competitive supply of telecommunications services."

She then added, "Part of TRA social responsibility, Family and children protection on the cyberspace was considered to assist the National efforts toward the Child Online Protection."

The Draft consumer protection guidelines can be viewed on TRA website. Consumers and consumer representations are strongly encouraged to review and provide feedback to TRA by 4:00 pm on 15 July 2009.