Accreditation
procedure by which an authoritative body gives formal recognition that an organization is competent to carry out specific tasks (def: ISO 15189:2012)
Accreditation is the independent, third-party evaluation of a conformity assessment body (such as certification body, inspection body or laboratory) against recognised standards, conveying formal demonstration of its impartiality and competence to carry out specific conformity assessment tasks (such as certification, inspection and testing).
Accreditation bodies are established in many economies with the primary purpose of ensuring that conformity assessment bodies are subject to oversight by an authoritative body. Accreditation bodies that have been peer-evaluated as competent sign regional and international arrangements to demonstrate their competence. These accreditation bodies then assess and accredit conformity assessment bodies to the relevant standards.
An authoritative body that performs accreditation is called an 'accreditation body'. The International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC) provide international recognitions to accreditation bodies. There are many internationally recognized accreditation bodies approved by the IAF and ILAC.
The Emirates International Accreditation Centre (EIAC) is the largest accreditation body in the Middle East, whereas in South Asia the Pakistan National Accreditation Council (PNAC) and National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), Quality Council of India (QCI) are the largest. In East Asia, the China National Accreditation Board is the largest, while the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) is the largest in Europe. The National Association of Testing Authorities (NATA) and the Joint Accreditation System of Australia and New Zealand (JAS-ANZ) being the largest in the Oceania region, with the South African National Accreditation System being the largest in Africa.
For most of the accreditation schemes, international standards issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) are used.
“Accreditation” enters the record as procedure by which an authoritative body gives formal recognition that an organization is competent to carry out specific tasks (def: ISO 15189:2012). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Accreditation, procedure and authoritative can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Accreditation” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Accreditation, procedure and authoritative provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q705899. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Accreditation”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Accreditation primary sources, Accreditation archive and Accreditation research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Accreditation”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Accreditation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.