A little over a month since the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act rebuttable presumption took effect, no importer so far has successfully overcome that presumption, Elva Muneton, acting executive director of the UFLPA Implementation Task Force said, speaking Aug. 3 during the CBP Detroit Field Office's Virtual Trade Week. "Thirty days into this. I have not seen any documentation that has been able to overcome the rebuttable presumption," she said. But, "it's only been 30 days so I think the documentation for a lot of the shippers that are detained are being assembled to be submitted to CBP. That's what I'm guessing is happening."
A new strategic partnership between the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking and international non-governmental organization Liberty Shared will help in the fight against forced labor, DHS said in a news release. "The partnership with Liberty Shared, formalized through a Memorandum of Understanding signed this week, will enable CCHT to further streamline intelligence, initiate new criminal investigations, and advance ongoing investigations to hold corporations and individual perpetrators accountable," DHS said.
Although President Joe Biden criticized President Donald Trump's China tariffs on the campaign trail, Peterson Institute for International Economics Senior Fellow Chad Bown said he always thought it was unlikely Biden would roll any of them back, because there are "huge political costs" to doing so, because opponents could label you as "weak on China."
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A Bank of America Securities research note said analysts believe the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act has been a "greater challenge than expected" for solar panel manufacturers, and at least three different suppliers' shipments have been detained in the first month since the law began to be enforced.
CBP's forced labor efforts are "really showing results," John Leonard, deputy executive assistant commissioner of CBP's Office of Trade, said July 19 at the Trade Facilitation and Cargo Security Summit. "Many of our [withhold release orders], especially the ones in Malaysia, are in the process of being modified, which means workers are being treated better," he said. "They're actually getting better pay, better living conditions." CBP will modify a WRO for a specific entity if it can show to CBP that all indicators of forced labor have been remediated.
International Trade Today is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case they were missed. All articles can be found by searching on the titles or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The Entity List released last month for the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) will be getting longer fairly soon, according to John Pickel, principal director, trade and economic competitiveness, Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans at DHS. Pickel, speaking at a CBP trade conference in California July 18, sad, "The process for adding and removing entities will be summarized in a Federal Register notice that we expect to come out in the short term."
Just as the U.S. trade representative declined to continue work toward a traditional free trade agreement with the U.K. begun during the previous administration, current USTR Katherine Tai announced July 14 that trade talks with Kenya will deal with trade facilitation, digital trade, science-based sanitary and phytosanitary rules and rooting out forced labor in supply chains -- not reducing tariffs on either side.
CBP’s reversal in an antidumping and countervailing duty evasion case at the Court of International Trade case puts the agency’s entire Enforce and Protect Act program “in jeopardy,” the domestic industry group Aluminum Extruders Council said in a blog post July 13.