EU Official Hopeful About Future of Multilateral Trade, Sanctions Cooperation
U.S.-EU cooperation on export controls, sanctions and other trade issues bodes well for the future of multilateral cooperation, said Rupert Schlegelmilch, a senior trade official with the European Commission, speaking during a June 22 event hosted by the Atlantic Council. Schlegelmilch specifically praised the work of the Trade and Technology Council’s export control working group (see 2206010007 and 2205160033), which allowed both sides to respond quickly to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
“We did have already the export control working group in place, people knew each other, they got off to a running start,” he said. There were "very deep and long discussions on how to sanction Russia without extraterritorial effects on each other.”
He also pointed to the World Trade Organization, which last week reached a partial agreement on fishing subsidies, an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and more (see 2206170010). He said the progress at the WTO will “reinvigorate our attempts to together work on the multilateral instances,” including from third countries. “This gives me some hope that we can also use our bilateral, stronger partnership together to try to use the multilateral institutions for better global governance for many areas,” Schlegelmilch said.