Fifth Balkan Standardization Conference was held in Belgrade, Republic of Serbia, in the period from 14 to 15 June 2016. The Conference was hosted by the Institute for Standardization of Serbia, and, in addition to the host, the Conference was attended by representatives of national standards bodies from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Croatia, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia and Turkey. The Institute for standardization of Bosnia and Herzegovina was represented by Mr Aleksandar Cincar, director and Mr Borislav Kraljević, Deputy Director of the Institute. As a representative of the European organizations for standardization, the first day of the Conference was attended by Mr Wim De Kesel, Vice President of CENELEC.

At the Conference there were discussed issues of importance to all participants. Participants talked about the cooperation between national standardization bodies and state authorities, translation of standards and the establishment of terminological bases, achieving financial sustainability of national standards bodies, as well as on the possibilities for participation in regional and European projects. All participants contributed to the analysis of the mentioned topics either by presenting the situation in their countries or participating in discussions on specific topics.

Although the issue of intellectual property rights and copyrights on standards was not an official theme of the Conference, this issue was also discussed several times during the Conference. It was noted that the general public is still not sufficiently informed about how important it is to prevent the inappropriate use of standards, unauthorized copying or unauthorized setting standards on the Internet.

At the end of the Conference the participants agreed that it is necessary to form a working group which task would be to establish rules and codes of good practice of the Conference, as well as to prepare the action plan for the next year. This would contribute to more functional and more efficient work of the Conference. Furthermore, it was concluded that it is necessary to take joint action regarding the protection of intellectual property rights. One of the conclusions refers to the need for further improvement of cooperation between the participants of the Balkan Conference.

Host of the Sixth Balkan Conference on Standardization in 2017 will be Turkey, and the host in 2018 will be Romania.