A State Department notice declaring that all agency efforts to control international trade now constitute a "foreign affairs function" of the U.S. under the Administrative Procedure Act will ultimately be subject to the discretion of the courts, trade lawyers told us.
Former U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan defended the Biden administration's final weeks of moves that imposed sanctions against Russia and export controls on China, saying they set up the current administration for success.
Denmark is considering new legislation that could punish EU sanctions violators by sentencing them to up to eight years in prison, an uptick from the current maximum four-month sentence, the country’s Ministry of Justice said this week. And if there are "aggravating circumstances," the ministry said, certain offenders could face up to eight years, according to an unofficial translation.
Two Democrats and two Republicans in the Senate asked the administration to press Canada on changing how it administers tariff rate quotas for U.S. dairy exports as it approaches a renegotiation.
Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, reintroduced a bill March 10 aimed at giving Congress more oversight over administration actions to ease sanctions on Iran.
The U.N. Security Council on March 11 updated the entries for 12 people on its ISIL (Da’esh) and al-Qaida sanctions list. The council updated some entries to indicate that they may have died, and it updated identifying information for the others.
The U.S. this week sanctioned Iranian Minister of Petroleum Mohsen Paknejad, along with several entities and ships helping to move Iranian oil, including to China.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies this month published English translations of recently updated or proposed semiconductor-related export controls issued by the Netherlands and Japan. The new Dutch regulations (see 2501150057) “specify which types of equipment now require a license to be legally exported from the Netherlands, based on specific technology usage or performance thresholds,” CSIS said, while the Japanese document includes proposed rules for “tighter restrictions on chip testing and measurement equipment, computer-aided design software, materials, and semiconductors.”
It’s possible that the Trump administration offers Russia some “symbolic” sanctions relief as part of peace negotiations with Ukraine, but the broader lifting of sanctions on Russia’s oil sector is more unlikely, a former U.S. sanctions official said this week.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a bill March 13 to restrict U.S. outbound investment in China, the latest of several attempts to pass legislation on a topic many lawmakers consider critical to national security.