A crane in Kazakhstan runs on two clocks: an EAEU certificate decides what may enter, and a national inspection regime decides what may keep working

▌  INDUSTRY BRIEFING  ·  SEPTEMBER 2026  ·  KAZAKHSTAN & EAEU

A crane in Kazakhstan runs on two clocks: an EAEU certificate decides what may enter, and a national inspection regime decides what may keep working

Two legal layers sit over a crane on a Kazakhstani site, and they were written for different questions. The first is union-level: TR CU 010/2011 On the safety of machinery and equipment, adopted by Decision No. 823 of the Customs Union Commission on 18 October 2011 and in force since 15 February 2013. The second is national: the Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan On Civil Protection No. 188-V ZRK of 11 April 2014, with the rules for lifting mechanisms made under it, and a supervision block rewritten by Law No. 196-VIII ZRK signed on 24 June 2025.

The two do not conflict. Certification decides whether a machine may be placed on the market at all; the national regime decides whether a registered crane may stay in service, who may operate it, and how much notice a site gets before an inspector arrives. What moved in 2026 is not the machine. It is the second clock — and it has just been set to run faster.

▌  01  THE TWO DATES

▌  IN FORCE SINCE 15 FEBRUARY 2013  TR CU 010/2011 was drafted under the 2010 agreement on common principles of technical regulation between Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, and Kazakhstan is named among the co-authoring states, alongside its ministries for investment and for emergency situations. It has been amended since — EEC Council Decision No. 37 of 16 May 2016 took effect on 2 December 2016, and Decision No. 137 of 24 November 2023 took effect on 23 November 2024. Neither touched the question of which machines a crane belongs to.

▌  SIGNED ON 24 JUNE 2025  Law No. 196-VIII ZRK amends several Kazakhstani legislative acts on civil protection, the electric power industry and state property management. Its industrial safety block takes supervision of industrial safety out of the Entrepreneurial Code and places it under the Law On Civil Protection from 2026, and introduces a separate state control and supervision procedure with risk categories attached. That is the date most suppliers have not yet noticed.

▌  02  WHAT TR CU 010/2011 REACHES ON A CRANE

▌  ANNEX N 3, ITEM 13  Annex N 3 lists the objects that must be confirmed in the form of certification, and item 13 names lifting-and-transport machinery, including façade construction hoists, escalators, passenger conveyors and cableway equipment, together with load-lifting cranes and lifting platforms for people with limited mobility. Cranes are named in the regulation, not inferred from it. That single line is why an EAC certificate, rather than a manufacturer’s declaration, is the usual document for a crane entering the union.

▌  ARTICLE 1(5)  The regulation applies to machines and equipment used at industrial hazardous facilities. That sentence is the hinge between the union text and Kazakhstan’s own register of hazardous production facilities: the same crane is a regulated product at the border and a registered technical device on site.

▌  WHAT IT DOES NOT COVER  TR CU 011/2011 is the technical regulation on the safety of lifts. It governs elevators, and it is not the document a tower crane or a mobile crane is assessed against. Reading the elevator regulation across to cranes is a common and expensive mistake, and the two should not be quoted interchangeably in a tender file.

▌  03  CERTIFICATE OR DECLARATION, AND THE EAC MARK

▌  THE ROUTE IS NOT YOUR CHOICE  Machinery outside Annex N 3 may be declared by the manufacturer under the declaration schemes. Machinery on the annex goes to an accredited certification body, which works through testing and, for series production, an assessment of the manufacturer’s production. Lifting-and-transport machinery and cranes sit in the second column. A supplier who offers only a declaration of conformity for a crane is describing the wrong procedure.

▌  FIVE YEARS IS THE USUAL CEILING  For series production, a certificate or declaration is valid for a maximum of five years; a single batch or a one-off delivery is tied to its contract instead. Compliance evidence is normally demonstrated against the list of standards adopted for the regulation — EEC Board Decision No. 28 of 9 March 2021, as amended by Decision No. 116 of 8 October 2024.

▌  THE EAC MARK, ARTICLE 12  Conforming machinery carries the single mark of placing products on the market, and the marking has to be applied to the machine itself. It carries the manufacturer’s name or trademark, the designation of the machine, and the month and year of manufacture. A certificate number on a purchase order is not the same thing as a mark on the machine.

▌  THE AMENDMENT THAT HAS NOT STARTED YET  EEC Council Decision No. 36 of 13 March 2026 amends TR CU 010/2011. It was published on 15 April 2026 and has not entered into force. Its transitional provisions allow Armenia and Kyrgyzstan to keep using declaration for items 15 to 31 of Annex N 3 until 1 April 2040, and hold a set of provisions back until 1 April 2028 in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. For Kazakhstan, the annex as it will then read is the version to plan against.

▌  04  THE NATIONAL LAYER: REGISTRATION AND INSPECTION

▌  REGISTERED BEFORE IT WORKS  Order of the Minister for Investments and Development No. 359 of 30 December 2014 approved the rules for ensuring industrial safety in the operation of lifting mechanisms; it was registered with the Ministry of Justice on 25 February 2015 under No. 10332. A crane subject to registration goes onto the register kept by the territorial subdivision of the industrial safety authority, and a full technical inspection is carried out before that registration, not after it.

▌  TWELVE MONTHS, THREE YEARS, FIVE YEARS  For cranes already in service the intervals are fixed: a partial inspection at least once every 12 months, and a full inspection at least once every 3 years. Rarely used cranes — those serving the machine halls of power and pumping stations or compressor plants, or used only for equipment repair — take a full inspection at least once every 5 years, and the owner decides whether a crane belongs in that category. An out-of-period full inspection follows relocation, reconstruction, replacement of a load-bearing element, a change of boom, or replacement of the hook, the hoist or the load ropes.

▌  TWO INSTRUMENTS, NOT ONE  Technical inspection is the owner’s periodic duty under the lifting-mechanism rules. Industrial safety expertise is a separate, independent assessment ordered in defined cases, including where a crane has exhausted the service life set by its manufacturer. The two are routinely described as the same thing, and they are not: one is a calendar obligation on the site, the other is a commissioned study that can decide whether the crane is used again at all.

▌  THE NAME ON THE CERTIFICATE  Crane operators and slingers must pass the periodic knowledge check required by Article 79 of the Law On Civil Protection. Rules approved by Order No. 332 of 9 July 2021 (registered No. 23461) govern how that training and checking is done; they were amended by Emergency Situations Order No. 442 of 7 October 2025, effective from 1 January 2026. Operating a crane with staff whose check has lapsed, or with an inspection period expired, is itself a ground for taking the crane out of service.

▌  05  THE 2026 SUPERVISORY RESET

▌  OUT OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL CODE  From 2026, industrial safety supervision sits under the Law On Civil Protection rather than the Entrepreneurial Code. At a briefing on 12 February 2026 the Committee for Industrial Safety of the Ministry for Emergency Situations said that 39 normative acts had been amended and 3 issued for the first time, among them rules on production-control staffing levels, a list of industrial safety requirements whose breach triggers immediate corrective measures, and standard forms for inspection reports and orders.

▌  HIGH RISK ANNUALLY, EVERYONE ELSE AT LEAST THREE YEARS APART  High-risk entities and facilities — those that must declare industrial safety, or that operate hazardous technical devices whose manufacturer-set service life has expired — can be inspected every year. Entities outside that category face inspection no more than once every three years. Risk category, not site size, now sets the calendar.

▌  ONE WORKING DAY, NOT THIRTY CALENDAR DAYS  The notice given before an inspection has been cut from 30 calendar days to 1 working day, and inspections may be carried out outside working hours, including at night, at weekends and on public holidays. Regulators also gained immediate corrective measures that can be applied without waiting for the full procedure to run. A month to tidy the file has become a single shift.

▌  WHAT THE FIRST YEAR PRODUCED  At a government meeting on 2 June 2026 the Ministry for Emergency Situations reported 570 enterprises inspected, more than 10,400 violations of industrial safety requirements, 523 officials held administratively liable, and fines of KZT 62.9 million. The activities of 7 entities and the operation of 695 facilities and technical devices were suspended. Twelve accidents at hazardous production facilities were registered, with 5 worker fatalities and 6 injuries. The number of enterprises inspected in the first five months of the year was 2.5 times the figure a year earlier.

▌  THE 2027 DEADLINE NOBODY QUOTES  Professional emergency rescue services, including the in-house teams that hazardous facilities are required to keep, must be certified for mine-rescue, gas-rescue and blowout-control work from 2027. For an operator that has priced rescue cover as an overhead line, that is a capital question, not a document question.

▌  06  WHAT IT MEANS WHEN YOU SPECIFY OR BUY

●  Who actually holds the EAC certificate for this machine — the exporter, or an authorised representative inside the union?

●  Does the certificate cover a series, and for how many of the five permitted years does it still run?

●  Is the crane on the territorial industrial safety register before first operation, and who files it — supplier or site?

●  Which inspection cycle has the site actually been scheduled for: 12 months, 3 years, or 5 years as a rarely used unit?

●  Has the manufacturer-set service life been reached, and if so who commissions the industrial safety expertise?

●  Are the operators’ and slingers’ knowledge checks current, and recorded in a form an inspector will accept at one working day’s notice?

▌  07  WHAT TO WATCH

●  Decision No. 36 of 13 March 2026 will restate Annex N 3 when it enters into force. The certification-versus-declaration boundary for lifting equipment is worth re-reading then, not now.

●  The 1 April 2028 application date for several provisions in Kazakhstan is later than most supply chains currently assume.

●  Inspection intensity, not legal text, is the practical variable. A one-working-day notice period changes how much of a site’s file has to be permanently ready.

●  Industrial safety expertise on cranes past their manufacturer-set service life is the pressure point most likely to retire an older fleet early.

●  Watch whether the 2025 amendments are followed by further consolidation of industrial safety rules through new Ministry for Emergency Situations orders in 2026 and 2027.

This briefing summarises EAEU and Kazakhstani national rules. It is not legal advice, and local rules still govern your site.

ABOUT

Shandong Zhinuo (ZNAQ) designs and manufactures tower crane safety monitoring systems and lifting-safety hardware for export markets, including load-moment limiting, zone-control and anti-collision functions. We follow the EAEU and Kazakhstani regimes that a crane has to satisfy after it crosses the border, and build the documentation a registered site is asked to keep.

▌  CONTACT  shandongzhinuo@outlook.com  +86 176 6371 0314 · en.znaqkj.com

SOURCES

Eurasian Economic Commission, TR CU 010/2011 On the safety of machinery and equipment — eec.eaeunion.org

Customs Union Commission, Decision No. 823 of 18 October 2011 — eec.eaeunion.org

Eurasian Economic Commission, Decision No. 36 of 13 March 2026 amending TR CU 010/2011 — garant.ru

English text of TR CU 010/2011, Annex N 3 item 13 — certificates.hk

Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan No. 188-V ZRK of 11 April 2014 On Civil Protection — zakon.uchet.kz

President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Law No. 196-VIII ZRK of 24 June 2025 — akorda.kz

Order of the Minister for Investments and Development No. 359 of 30 December 2014 (registered 25 February 2015, No. 10332) — zakon.uchet.kz

Order of the Ministry for Emergency Situations No. 332 of 9 July 2021 (registered No. 23461), as amended by Order No. 442 of 7 October 2025 — zakon.uchet.kz

Committee for Industrial Safety, Ministry for Emergency Situations, technical inspection intervals for lifting mechanisms — gov.kz

Ministry for Emergency Situations, briefing on the new industrial safety inspection mechanism, 12 February 2026 — gov.kz

Government of the Republic of Kazakhstan, industrial safety review, 2 June 2026 — primeminister.kz