The European Commission on Dec. 1 sent the European Council the deal it reached with Japan on cross-border data flows to be included in the EU-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement. If the council authorizes it, the amendment to the EPA will be sent to the European Parliament for consent, after which it would take effect, the commission announced.
The EU General Court on Nov. 29 rejected Russian oligarch German Khan's challenge to his sanctions listing, according to an unofficial translation. The listing criteria had a proper legal basis and were not disproportional, the court said.
The European Council on Nov. 29 passed a negotiating mandate for the council president to start talks with the European Parliament on new rules for the "import, export and transit of firearms into and from the EU," the council announced. The mandate says the rules must look to close the loopholes for firearm trafficking while easing trade of firearms for "legitimate purposes."
The French government didn't pressure the European Commission to launch the countervailing duty investigation on electric vehicle batteries from China announced in October (see 2310040012), said Martin Lukas, who heads the commission's trade defense directorate. Lukas, speaking on the commission’s Trade-Off podcast released Nov. 28, said the commission had been studying China’s increasing share of the EU’s EV battery market and said the investigation wasn’t brought because of urging from any single EU member state, despite some media reports.
The European Commission on Nov. 28 imposed provisional antidumping duties on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic product imports from China. The duties will range from 6.6% to 24.2%, and companies not given a specific rate will face the 24.2% dumping rate, the commission announced. It said the duties stem from an EU investigation provisionally finding that Chinese imports present "a threat of a clearly foreseeable and imminent injury to EU industry."
The U.K. last week renewed a Russia-related general license that authorizes certain transactions tied to payments that have been processed by a sanctioned credit or financial institution at some point in the payment chain. The license applies when the sanctioned party acted as an original, correspondent or intermediary institution where the recipient institution and the institution that sent the payment are not designated parties, among other conditions. The license, which was scheduled to expire Dec. 1 (see 2310020016), now lasts through Dec. 14.
The European Parliament last week overwhelmingly adopted three resolutions urging strong EU sanctions against those in Iran, Niger and Georgia involved in human rights abuses. The resolutions call on the bloc to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization and to sanction the country’s supreme leader, president and prosecutor-general. They also said EU member states should implement sanctions against the leaders of a July military coup in Niger, and asked the European Council to sanction those responsible for “violations of Georgian sovereignty” and human rights stemming from Russia's illegal occupation of certain regions of Georgia.
The European Parliament voted last week to reject a proposed sustainable pesticides regulation that could set new limits on imported agricultural goods and food products, along with other pesticide-related bans (see 2310260029). Parliament said 299 members voted against the proposal, 207 supported it and 121 abstained. “With this vote, Parliament has effectively rejected the Commission proposal and closed its first reading,” the legislative body said in a news release. It added that the European Council must still decide “on its own position on the proposal to determine whether it is definitively rejected or returns to Parliament for a second reading.”
The EU this week put in place humanitarian exemptions for 10 of its sanctions regimes to authorize certain transactions related to aid and “basic human needs,” the European Council said. The exemptions, which implement the U.N. Security Council’s humanitarian carve-out that the body approved last year (see 2212120054), cover EU’s sanctions regime for cyberattacks as well as its regimes for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Guinea, Lebanon, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Tunisia, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
The EU this week adopted a regulation to open its 2024, 2025 and 2026 autonomous tariff quotas for certain fishery products and establish rules for the management of those quotas. The quotas will be granted only for products imported for processing in the EU, and the regulation will suspend or reduce duties for a limited volume of imports for each of those three years. Duties and volumes will be “specific to each product,” the EU said.