Halal Accreditation Bodies Explained

A halal accreditation body attests that a halal certification body is competent, consistent, and impartial enough to issue certificates. It sits one layer above the certifier and never certifies a product itself. Its job is to audit the certifier against a published conformity assessment standard, then grant, suspend, or withdraw that certifier’s accreditation. When you see a certifier claim accreditation by EIAC, HAK, or the GCC Accreditation Center, this is the credential in question.

The word gets confused with certification and with recognition, often on certifiers’ own websites. This guide sets out what an accreditation body does, the standards it works to, the main bodies operating today, and where accreditation stops and market recognition begins.

What a halal accreditation body does

Certification and accreditation answer different questions. A halal certification body audits a manufacturer and issues a certificate for a product or a facility. An accreditation body audits the certifier and issues an attestation that the certifier runs its scheme properly. The chain runs from producer, to certification body, to accreditation body, and the standard tightens at each step.

That oversight is what stops the halal mark from meaning whatever a certifier wants it to mean. An accreditation body checks the certifier’s governance, its auditor competence, its impartiality safeguards, and the scope of the products it is fit to certify, such as meat, nutraceuticals, or cosmetics. Accreditation is renewable and revocable, so a certifier holds it only for as long as it keeps meeting the criteria.

The standards behind halal accreditation

The baseline is ISO/IEC 17065, the international standard of requirements for bodies certifying products, processes, and services. It is written to be used as accreditation criteria, and almost every serious halal scheme starts from it.

Halal schemes then add a religious and technical layer. The Standards and Metrology Institute for Islamic Countries (SMIIC), the standards institute of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, publishes a linked set. OIC/SMIIC 1:2019 covers general requirements for halal food. OIC/SMIIC 2:2019 sets requirements for bodies providing halal certification, so it governs the certifiers and is built largely on ISO/IEC 17065 and ISO/IEC 17021-1. OIC/SMIIC 3:2019 sets requirements for the accreditation bodies that accredit those certifiers, so it governs the accreditors themselves. In the Gulf, certifiers are assessed instead against GSO 2055-2, the standard of general requirements for halal certification bodies. Our guide to global halal standards explained unpacks how these documents relate.

The main halal accreditation bodies

A handful of national bodies do most of the halal accreditation in circulation.

The Emirates International Accreditation Centre (EIAC) accredits the halal conformity assessment bodies serving the UAE and its MOIAT halal programme, and its accreditation is one of the credentials American and European certifiers most often list.

The Halal Accreditation Agency (HAK), under Turkey’s Ministry of Trade, accredits against the OIC/SMIIC standards and issued the world’s first OIC/SMIIC 2 accreditation in 2019.

The GCC Accreditation Center (GAC), set up by the GCC Standardization Organization in 2010, accredits halal certifiers for the Gulf states against GSO 2055-2:2021 and applies IHAF requirements on top.

Above these sits the International Halal Accreditation Forum (IHAF), a Dubai based network founded in 2016. IHAF does not accredit or certify anyone. It aligns the criteria its member accreditation bodies apply, so an accreditation granted by one member rests on comparable ground elsewhere. SMIIC, by contrast, writes the standards but does not itself accredit.

Accreditation is not the same as recognition

Accreditation is easy to mistake for market acceptance, and the two are separate. Accreditation is an independent judgement that a certifier is technically competent. Recognition is a decision by a destination market’s authority to accept that certifier’s certificates for goods entering its market. One is about competence, the other about access.

JAKIM in Malaysia shows the split clearly. It keeps its own recognition list and runs its own assessment, so a certifier can hold ISO/IEC 17065 accreditation and still be missing from JAKIM’s list, in which case its certificates carry no weight at the Malaysian border. For the full picture, read recognition versus accreditation and what JAKIM recognition means.

How to check a certifier’s accreditation

Verify accreditation from the accreditation body’s own register, never from a certifier’s marketing page. Find the certifier on the register of EIAC, HAK, GAC, or another accreditor, then confirm two things: that the accreditation is current, and that its scope covers the product category you care about. An accreditation for food processing does not cover cosmetics or pharmaceuticals.

Once accreditation checks out, treat it as a quality filter rather than a passport. It tells you a competent assessor has examined the certifier on an ongoing basis. It does not tell you which markets will accept the resulting certificate, and for that you still go to each destination authority’s recognition list.