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 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 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.
Arif Ugur, a Turkish national who was debarred by the State Department in June (see 2306140028) after pleading guilty last year to violating the Arms Export Control Act (see 2212150082), was deported from the U.S. last week, ICE announced. The U.S. said Ugur illegally exported defense technical data to manufacturers in Turkey to make military parts that he then supplied to the Defense Department.
Prominent members of the House of Representatives objected to a USMCA panel ruling last week that said Canada's rewrite of its tariff rate quotas for U.S. dairy exports didn't violate the trade agreement (see 2311240002). U.S. farmers thought they would have the opportunity to sell directly to Canadian consumers, but dairy processors in Canada still control access.
The U.K.’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation this week amended an existing entry under its Iran sanctions regime. The move updated identifying information for Ya Mahdi Industries Group, which was designated for its involvement in Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
A senior State Department official this week said the U.S. is planning to eventually include other nations in an ongoing effort to reduce burdensome defense export control requirements for Australia and the U.K. In perhaps the strongest endorsement yet by a U.S. official of the concept, Bonnie Jenkins, undersecretary for arms control and international security, said the U.S. wants to involve other nations after it works through its current process under the Australia-U.K.-U.S. (AUKUS) partnership.
Jose Rodriguez, an export enforcement agent with the Bureau of Industry and Security, will serve for the next year as a senior export control officer at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, he announced last week on LinkedIn. Rodriguez was most recently an enforcement agent based in Oregon and New Delhi.
Six users of the virtual currency mixer Tornado Cash are appealing a U.S. court decision that upheld sanctions against the cryptocurrency service, saying the Treasury Department illegally stretched its authorities “beyond recognition” when it designated Tornado Cash last year. The six people argued that U.S. sanctions laws don’t allow Treasury to designate an “open-source software project” like Tornado Cash because it doesn’t meet the definition of “property” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
The Commerce Department quietly stopped approving new licenses for firearms exports to three Latin American countries months before publicly announcing a broader suspension in October for dozens of other nations.