The contracting parties to the Harmonized System Convention approved the 2022 edition of the Harmonized System, the World Customs Organization said in a news release. “The HS serves as the basis for Customs tariffs and for the compilation of international trade statistics in 211 economies (of which 158 are Contracting Parties to the HS Convention),” it said. The new HS2022, which comes into force Jan. 1, 2022, “makes some major changes to the Harmonized System with a total of 351 sets of amendments covering a wide range of goods moving across borders,” the WCO said.

Possible transshipment of shrimp claimed as from Malaysia could be behind a slew of import alerts from the Food and Drug Administration in recent years, Malaysia's Fisheries Department said in a Jan. 4 news release. The Malaysian agency issued the statement in response to an article in The Star about the state of seafood from the country that noted that between 2009 and 2018, the FDA found illegal antibiotics among many shrimp shipments. “We suspect an element of transshipment, involving shrimp from foreign countries outside of our jurisdiction, that were imported and then re-exported to the United States,” the department said in its statement, according to an unofficial translation. The agency said “a total of 2,466 samples were taken for the period 2008 to date and analyzed at the Fisheries Biosecurity Laboratory which has been ISO certified and found that no antibiotic substances were detected and that all local livestock shrimp samples were not detected / negative in the presence of antibiotics.”

The Chinese government will offer legal services through “an intellectual property service station” at the Consumer Electronics Show Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas in order to respond to intellectual property rights infringement injunctions, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a notice, according to an unofficial translation. “The service station employs American practicing lawyers from well-known American law firms to provide exhibitors with free legal advisory services on intellectual property rights and assist enterprises in resolving intellectual property infringement disputes,” the ministry said.

The U.S. delegation to the World Trade Organization rejected a proposal from countries on how to reform the appellate body (see 1912090031), saying that without understanding how the appellate body's overreach problem developed, there's no reason to believe that restating the constraints on the appellate body's authority will work. In December, when the appellate body ceased to exist because of U.S. refusal to allow new appointees, the National Foreign Trade Council hired Tailwinds Global Strategy's Bruce Hirsh to put forward ideas of how to resolve the impasse

The World Trade Organization may have its first answer to what happens when a party appeals and there's no appellate body to resolve the dispute. The U.S., which killed the appellate body by not agreeing to appoint any replacements, is appealing a compliance report for a case in which India won the argument that the U.S. antidumping and countervailing case against Indian steel didn't fully follow trade law (see 14081205 and 1706090021).

The phase one trade deal (see 1912130035) between the U.S. and China has reduced Chinese “market uncertainty” and the two sides should cancel the remaining tariffs, a spokesman for China’s National Bureau of Statistics said during a Dec. 16 press conference. “It has strengthened market confidence and promoted economic and trade development, both for China and the United States, and for the world,” Fu Linghui said, according to an unofficial translation. “[It is] positive.” He also said the countries are continuing negotiations and should cancel “the levy of tariffs in stages, contributing more power to world economic growth.”

World Trade Organization members have again agreed to extend a moratorium on imposing customs duties on data transfers, the WTO said in a Dec. 10 press release. The moratorium, which has been renewed at every opportunity since 1998, will now remain in effect at least until the WTO’s 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) in June 2020. WTO members, who were meeting as the WTO general council, also agreed Dec. 10 “to continue work under the existing 1998 work programme on e-commerce in the beginning part of 2020,” the release said. “The work in the run-up to MC12 will include structured discussions on issues that would help ministers take an informed decision by MC12.”

Even as Republicans and Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee asked the Trump administration to keep the World Trade Organization appellate body functioning while it pushes for reforms, the American ambassador to the WTO said Dec. 9 that the administration will not support any appellate body nominations, even as other countries agreed that the appellate body would change how it operated. More than 25 think tanks and trade groups, including the National Retail Federation and Americans for Prosperity, had also sent a letter Dec. 6 asking that the U.S. agree to the Walker Principles, named after New Zealand's ambassador to the WTO.

Japan’s Diet approved the country’s trade deal with the U.S., Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a Dec. 3 notice, according to an unofficial translation. The deal passed in Japan’s upper house after being approved by Japan’s lower house on Nov. 19 (see 1911190045), and sets up a Jan. 1, 2020, effective date. The deal, signed by the two countries in October, will eliminate nearly 250 tariff lines of Japanese imports into the U.S. and will lower Japanese tariffs on hundreds of U.S. exports, including food and agricultural goods (see 1910070074)

For a second time, a World Trade Organization panel rejected the European Union's claim that it has ended launch subsidies for Airbus, and remedied their adverse effects on Boeing. The earlier compliance panel ruling against Airbus led to the largest authorized tariff action ever at the WTO -- the $7.5 billion worth of goods from EU countries facing either 10 percent or 25 percent tariffs (see 1910020044).