The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is soliciting comments on a strategy to combat forced labor, at Regulations.gov, docket number USTR-2022-0006. Although CBP is the primary agency responsible for preventing goods made with forced labor from reaching customers in the U.S., USTR is conducting an interagency review of existing trade policies and tools to combat forced labor, "to determine areas that may need strengthening and gaps that may need to be filled." Comments are due by Aug. 5.
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CBP should not require “comprehensive supply chain mapping” as part of its requirements for the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism forced labor component, and should update the requirements so that mapping is done via a risk-based approach, said Kerry Novak, who sits on the Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee’s Secure Trade Lanes Subcommittee, in recommendations she read at the COAC’s June 29 meeting.
Solar panel exports were already facing heightened CBP scrutiny under a withhold release order affecting a major supplier of polysilicon, a material used to make ingots that are then made into cells, which are then made into panels. But the early results of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act enforcement suggest that the Biden administration is willing to strictly enforce UFLPA "despite impacts on [solar panel] supply and pricing," said Tim Brightbill, a trade lawyer at Wiley.
The Treasury Department published its fall 2022 regulatory agenda for CBP. The only new mention of any regulations is a return to the agenda for a final rule that would "create a procedure for the disclosure of information otherwise protected by the Trade Secrets Act to a trademark owner when merchandise bearing suspected counterfeit trademarks has been voluntarily abandoned." CBP issued the underlying proposal in 2019 (see 1908260040), and the final rule had been on Treasury's regulatory agenda for 2020 and spring of 2021 before moving to the long-term actions category in the most recent agenda.
A lawyer who has represented clients whose goods were detained over suspicion of forced labor says the new document laying out the strategy on enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is not earth-shattering.
CBP posted more documents ahead of the June 29 Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) meeting:
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 published strategy to stop imports of goods with Xinjiang region content is lengthy, but it also shows how many blanks are left to be filled in. The rebuttable presumption that goods with a nexus to Xinjiang or Uyghur workers are banned took effect on June 21.
Trade ministers meeting at the World Trade Organization in Geneva agreed to a partial solution to harmful subsidies for fishing fleets, an intellectual property waiver for Covid vaccines, and to allow sale of commodities to the World Food Program even if the product is otherwise subject to export restrictions. The countries that attended the ministerial conference also agreed to extend the moratorium on tariffs on electronic transmissions.