On September 14, 2020, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued five Withhold Release Orders (WROs) for a range of goods produced in the Xinjiang region of China. Under 19 U.S.C. § 1307, CBP can initiate enforcement actions for products made wholly or “in part” by forced or indentured labor—defined…
On September 18, 2020, the U.S. Commerce Department published two rules defining the scope of prohibited transactions related to the mobile applications, WeChat and TikTok. The scope of prohibited transactions clarified the two parallel executive orders (EOs) issued by the Trump administration on August 6, 2020, which required the Commerce…
On September 15, 2020, the U.S. Department of Treasury published a final rule that removes the mandatory declaration requirement for filings to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) based on North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code and replaces it with a determination based on…
On August 11, 2020, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued a new guidance document, the Sudan Program and Darfur Sanctions Guidance (“Sudan Guidance”), which clarifies the current status of sanctions and export controls that apply to Sudan and the Government of Sudan. The Sudan…
The Department of Commerce (the Department) has proposed to modify its regulations under Part 351 of Title 19 to improve administration and enforcement of the antidumping duty (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) laws.[1] The proposed modifications have been undertaken with a view to address circumvention and evasion of duties and…
On August 17, 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) made available for public inspection a final rule expanding restrictions on Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and its non-U.S. affiliates on the BIS Entity List (collectively “Huawei”). In the final rule, BIS announced a further expansion…
On July 23, 2020, the U.S. Senate passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021 (NDAA) which includes an amendment that expands sanctions in connection with the Nord Stream 2 and TurkStream pipeline projects. The amendment is based on a bill previously introduced by Senators…
On August 6, 2020, President Trump issued a pair of executive orders targeting China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd. (Tencent) and its mobile application WeChat and ByteDance Ltd. (ByteDance) and its mobile application TikTok. The orders instructed the U.S. Commerce Department to prohibit the following within 45 days from their issuance (by…
Over the past nine months, companies and governments have competed for goods and materials amidst scarcity and disrupted supply chains. At the same time, governments, central banks, international organizations and NGOs have poured money into economies, hoping to provide relief, meet demand to procure essential goods, and find solutions to…
As we’ve discussed previously, in 2018, the UK enacted the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act (the Act), allowing it to impose its own post-Brexit autonomous sanctions regime. On July 6, 2020, the UK imposed its first sanctions under the Act: the Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020 (the Regulations). Under…