The U.S., the U.K. and Canada last week issued a range of new sanctions to mark the internationally recognized Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, designating people across more than 10 jurisdictions for their ties to human rights violations. They include U.S. sanctions against Chinese officials with ties to human rights abuses in Xinjiang, including one designated under the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act.
Exports to China
American chip designer Nvidia is working with the Biden administration to make sure its products comply with U.S. export restrictions, CEO Jensen Huang said during a news conference in Singapore this week.
A conference report on the 2024 defense spending bill released this week by House and Senate negotiators said the legislation won’t include a polarizing measure that could have led to new guardrails around U.S. outbound investments into China. The leaders of the Senate and House Armed Services committees ultimately decided to leave out the provision in the compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act despite the fact that it passed as part of Senate’s version of the NDAA in July (see 2307280052).
The U.K. this week designated 25 people and 20 entities under its Russia sanctions regime. The listings included a mix of businesses based in Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Serbia and Uzbekistan, covering industries in the energy, shipping and defense sectors. Among those sanctioned was Russian firm Aeroscan, which was designated for supplying drones to the Russian military, along with Dubai-based shipping companies Radiating World Shipping Services and Star Voyages Shipping services, which do business in a Russian "sector of strategic significance."
Bureau of Industry and Security Undersecretary Alan Estevez called this week for more funding from Congress, suggesting BIS may need a substantially increased annual budget to more effectively implement and enforce export controls against China and other countries.
The Bureau of Industry and Security needs to overhaul its export control policies to stem the flow of U.S. national security technology that is fueling China’s military modernization, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said in a report marking the end of a 90-day review of the agency (see 2210030068).
Three days after Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo suggested her Bureau of Industry and Security needs more funding to handle a surge in export licensing requests (see 2312040041), three key House Republicans said on Dec. 5 that BIS must strengthen its export controls before they will support a budget increase for the agency.
African and Brazilian participants at the U.N. Climate Change Conference complained that the EU's due diligence requirement to certify that commodities were not grown on deforested land in the tropics (see 2112030047 and 2307270041) is burdensome to small farmers in their countries.
China’s Ministry of Commerce criticized the U.S. government's recent sanctions against Chinese companies this week for illegally supplying Russia's military and defense industrial base (see 2312050046), saying the move is a "typical example of unilateral sanctions," which undermine international trade rules and affects the security of supply chains. China is "strongly dissatisfied with and firmly opposed to this,” the ministry said, according to an unofficial translation. The news release called for an immediate cessation of the sanctions, adding that China will "safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises."
One day after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told AFP that the bloc won't "tolerate" a trade imbalance with China, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said China has never sought a trade surplus with Europe and pushed back on the notion that the trading relationship has hurt the EU.