Mrs. Mahassen Ajam, TRA Board member and Head of Information and Consumer Affairs  unit, and Mrs. Corine Feghaly, Senior Consumer Affairs Expert, participated in the latest EMERG workshop on Consumer Protection in Paris on April 13-15, 2011.

The workshop focused on various topics and to cite but a few:

• Roles and responsibilities for consumer affairs in telecommunications
• Consumer information and switching session that basically studies how regulators can help empower consumers and focuses on market transparency and the ability to change providers
• Consumer protection and complaints handling

Mrs. Corine Feghaly highlighted the Authority’s prerogatives to protect consumers by virtue of Telecom Law 431 and its related actions regulatory actions mainly by issuing the Draft Consumer Affairs Regulation and the Draft Code of Practice for Value Added Services.

Mrs. Feghaly briefed the attendees about the successful cooperation between the Authority and the Consumer Protection Directorate at the Ministry of Economy and Trade to share a hotline and a data base to receive and handle telecom consumer complaints. She also praised the service providers’ positive collaboration with the Authority to handle consumer complaints despite the non-yet applicable related regulations whereby the liberalization process is halted and the fixed and mobile operators are still owned by the public sector.

Finally, Mrs. Feghaly gave a real-time live presentation on the consumer section of the TRA’s website by going over the useful parts and highlighting the sections related to Children Protection, Offers and Tariffs and the Consumer Brochures, which are not only available online, but were also distributed to main locations of all Lebanese Telecom Service Providers.

It is worth mentioning that EMERG is the Euro-Mediterranean network for Regulators, which the TRA is member of since 2008. This network aims at strengthening the co-operation between Euro-Mediterranean Telecommunications Regulatory Authorities in the region, share knowledge and best-practices.