European Commission Eyes Changes to AD/CVD Laws
The European Commission wants to modernize Europe's trade defense system, it said April 10. It proposed changes to make the regime work better for producers, importers and other stakeholders. Anti-dumping and anti-subsidy instruments will be more efficient and better enforced to shield EU producers from unfair practices by foreign firms and to protect against retaliation, the EC said. Importers will have more predictability about changing duty rates, making their business planning easier. In addition, the entire system will become more open and user-friendly, it said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
Under the plan, the EC will: (1) Inform businesses about any provisional anti-dumping or anti-subsidy measures two weeks before the duties are imposed. (2) Offer importers reimbursement of duties collected during an expiration review of a trade defense measure in case the EC determines that there's no need for the measure after five years. (3) Protect EU industry by launching investigations on its own, without any official request from industry, when a retaliation threat exists. (4) Discourage other trading partners from engaging in some unfair trading practices by setting higher duties on imports from countries which use unfair subsidies and create structural distortions in the their material markets.
The legislative proposal must be approved by the European Council and Parliament and probably won't become law before 2014, the EC said.