Export Compliance Daily is providing readers with the top stories from last week in case you missed them. You can find any article by searching the title or by clicking on the hyperlinked reference number.
The Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee (COAC) for CBP will next meet remotely June 23, CBP said in a notice. Comments are due in writing by June 22.
Uyghur Human Rights Project Board Chair Nury Turkel told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his nonprofit wants swift passage of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would create a rebuttable presumption that goods from China's Xinjiang province were made with forced labor. "The 11 current Withhold-release orders (WROs) are a wholly inadequate response to the gravity of the crimes, the harm to American workers whose wages are undercut by forced-labor competition, and the unwitting complicity of American consumers who buy face masks, hair weaves, cotton apparel, and solar panels produced by the forced labor of Muslim Uyghurs," he said in his prepared testimony.
Democrats in the House insisted that their ideas about how to verify compliance with Mexico's labor laws is a balanced one that respects their sovereignty. Chief Mexican negotiator on USMCA, Jesus Seade, wrote a column published Dec. 4 that said, in Spanish, that there will be no “transnational inspectors,” even though the U.S. has pushed so much for that approach. "If the U.S. stops insisting on the pair of unacceptable ideas that the [Mexican trade group CCE] statement yesterday speaks of, we can soon have a treaty, and a very good treaty," he wrote (see 1912030033). He said that the state-to-state dispute settlement system, broken in NAFTA, "will now be 100% repaired, for all topics and sectors under the treaty."
Rep. Ron Kind, co-chairman of the New Democrats' trade task force, said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has done a good job on outreach, and sounding sympathetic to Democrats' complaints about enforceability, labor and other issues they want changed in the NAFTA rewrite. But Kind, who was speaking to reporters on a conference call from the Midwest on Sept. 4, said that "for some reason there's been a reluctance on sharing paper, putting words down" that would change the trade deal to satisfy these requests.
Leaders of the generally pro-trade New Democrat Coalition warned the U.S. trade representative not to send an implementing bill for the new NAFTA to Congress on July 9. Rep. Derek Kilmer, chairman of the New Dems, and Rep. Gregory Meeks, co-chairman of the group's trade task force, spoke to reporters July 8 about why they sent a letter that day to USTR warning him off.
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."