House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee Chairman Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said after a June 25 hearing on Mexican labor reform that the Democrats asking for changes to the NAFTA rewrite are asking for changes that are "relatively narrow." "Our hope is we can move with dispatch, get our concerns resolved, strengthen the agreement and move forward," he said, adding that trade deal votes "never get easy, putting them off."
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced a bill on June 25 that would limit the ability of the executive branch to bypass congressional approval of foreign arms sales. The bill, called the Saudi Arabia False Emergencies Act, had bipartisan support and was advanced less than a week after the Senate voted to block billions of dollars worth of arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that the Trump administration had announced May 24 (see 1906200052). The administration had used an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act to skip congressional approval.
Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with some of the top stories for June 17-21 in case they were missed.
European Union entities are struggling with compliance ambiguity resulting from the U.S.’s reimposition of Iranian sanctions that conflict with EU laws, according to a June 21 report by the Financial Markets Law Committee, a United Kingdom-based legal association.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee on June 20 advanced a bill that would impose sanctions on Burmese officials and military-owned entities, for human rights abuses. The bill, named the Burma Act of 2019, would also sanction current and former senior officials of the Burmese military -- and any entities they own -- who took “significant steps to impede investigations or prosecutions of alleged serious human rights abuses.” The bill would also sanction entities, such as the Myanmar Economic Cooperation or the Myanmar Economic Holding Corporation, that are controlled by Burmese security forces. The sanctions would take effect for an eight-year period beginning 270 days after the bill is enacted. The bill next heads to the House floor.
The World Customs Organization will be reconsidering some classification decisions at the next Harmonized System Committee meeting in September, according to law firm Sandler Travis. The reconsideration involves classification decisions of "at least two products -- certain vitamins and certain RF generators and RE matching networks -- after reservations were filed by the U.S. and others against the classification decisions," Sandler Travis said in a June 20 email.
A Senate bill introduced June 13 with bipartisan support would require the Trump administration to submit reports to Congress on whether Hong Kong is following U.S. export control laws and sanctions. The requirement, part of a bill that would amend the Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992, would order the Treasury, State and Commerce secretaries to send several House and Senate committees a report on whether Hong Kong has enforced U.S. export controls with respect to “sensitive dual-use items” and abided by both U.S. and United Nations sanctions. The administration would need to submit the reports within 180 days after the enactment of the bill, which was introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
In the June 19 edition of the Official Journal of the European Union the following trade-related notices were posted:
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who's been working for months on a compromise bill to address national security tariffs, said that an introduction won't happen until after the August recess. "We're trying to get a consensus on [Section] 232s, that isn't the easiest thing," he said. "But we're making some progress." He said, speaking to reporters on June 19, that he'd had meetings on the bill that day.
The Mexican Senate voted to ratify the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement on June 19, positioning Mexico to become first of the three countries to approve the renegotiated NAFTA. There have been some initial movements toward consideration of the deal by the U.S. Congress, and Canada is seen as likely following the U.S.'s lead before its legislature gets fully engaged (see 1906110040).