The Court of International Trade’s recent tariff classification decision on Cyber Power’s uninterruptible power supplies “may be a meaningful reset of the law of substantial transformation,” moving the analysis back to a comparison between parts and finished components after a period of focus on essence or critical components, customs lawyer Larry Friedman said in a Feb. 27 blog post.

The Court of International Trade on Feb. 27 ruled in favor of an importer on the Philippine origin of one of its models of power supplies and surge protectors, but found the importer didn’t prove a substantial transformation occurred for five others and upheld CBP’s finding of Chinese origin for those models.

On the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the White House said that, beginning March 10, there will be a 200% tariff on Russian aluminum exports, including derivative products, and, beginning on April 10, aluminum articles from other countries that used any aluminum from Russia also will be tariffed at 200%, unless those third countries also impose 200% tariffs on imported Russian aluminum.

CBP published a set of new guidance documents for importers on the agency’s enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act on Feb. 23, including new answers to frequently asked questions on its website, best practices for submitting documentation to prove detained goods aren’t subject to UFLPA, and guidance on how executive summaries and tables of contents should be put together for that documentation.

Frozen risottos are classified as pre-cooked foods under Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States heading 1904, even though the risottos are only par-cooked and require more cooking by the consumer, CBP said in a recently released headquarters ruling. Though the importer argued for classification as food preparations of HTS heading 2106, CBP said foods may be considered pre-cooked if they require up to 12 minutes of additional cooking time, and the frozen risottos only require cooking for two to seven minutes more, CBP said in HQ H325964.

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The Biden administration will purportedly not move to block a limited exclusion order from the International Trade Commission on Apple watches, according to AliveCor, the company that brought the underlying Section 337 complaint.

A Democratic and a Republican senator agreed at an international conference that a U.S. carbon border adjustment tax will be useful, both for making sure domestic industry is competitive and to convince China to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.

CBP is unlikely to publicly list every entity that it determines engages in forced labor, said Ana Hinojosa, the former executive director of CBP's Trade Remedy Law Enforcement Directorate. Although importers want CBP to provide them with a comprehensive list of potential companies not to work with, Hinojosa said it would be “an impossibility” based on how quickly companies change names after getting caught.

The two most important people in global trade, according to a conference moderator -- the U.S. trade representative and her EU counterpart -- presented a united front on the need for a new approach at the World Trade Organization, a new flavor of globalization, and their ambitions to work together on coordinating a standard for green trade and ways to confront distortive trade practices.