Import Rules is an independent guide to EU product regulations, published from Lemmer, the Netherlands, and run by one person: Bart. It is reference material, not legal advice, and it is not part of any consultancy, laboratory or notified body.
I am Bart van den Brug, a broker in sustainable commodities. My work is simple to describe and hard to do: I connect buyers and sellers across borders, which means every shipment runs into the same wall. EU rules are public, but the information a business owner actually needs is scattered, incomplete, or written by someone who wants to sell a service.
What struck me, after years of watching my clients struggle with the same questions I had myself, is how little clear and honest guidance exists. The official sources are technically correct but unreadable. The commercial guides are readable but vague. Nobody combines the two: answers you can act on, with the regulation and article named so you can check them yourself.
Then my own bank reported counterparties of my brokerage as sanctioned. The screening tools I had access to found nothing, because those parties sat on lists the tools did not search. The gap between compliance as sold and compliance as enforced stopped being theoretical for me. This site is what I built from that experience.
What you will find here: a free sanctions check that searches all the official lists, including the ones my own incident proved get skipped, an honest page about what to do when it is too late for prevention, and a reference guide for every other rule an importer meets. Every answer names its source, carries a verification date, and was written for the person signing the customs declaration, not the compliance department.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I try to be as accurate as one person working from official sources can be, and I put a date on everything. I can still be wrong. If you find an error, or something that is missing, tell me: it gets corrected, with the source noted and the date updated. That is not a disclaimer to me; it is the product.
Bart van den Brug
broker, founder of Import Rules; Lemmer, the Netherlands
Every answer on this site states three things: the regulation, the article, and the date the answer was last checked. Answers are written from the published official texts; consolidated regulations on EUR-Lex, ECHA guidance, national authority pages; not from blogs or each other. Where member states implement a rule differently, the answer says so instead of averaging it away. Answers carry a verification date because rules change; an answer without a date is an opinion.
Next to the guide we measure AI visibility: when a buyer asks a model like ChatGPT "who can be my EU responsible person", which companies' sources get used? For each measured company we put the real buyer questions to the search and source services that language models draw on, and count who appears and who does not. Three rules keep it honest:
The method, the outcome per company and the disclaimer are in every report we deliver. An example of a real report is on the example report page.
The answers in the guide are editorial: no company can pay to be named in an answer, to be added to the provider tables, or to have a competitor removed. Paid products; extended listings, sponsorships, reports and monitoring subscriptions; exist next to the guide, are always labelled, and are capped (five extended listings per section, one sponsor per topic page). The terms bind us to that as much as they bind you.
Wrong about something? Say so via the contact form and it gets corrected, with the source noted and the verification date updated. Publishing corrections is part of the product, not an exception to it.
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