EU Aiming to Finalize Economic Security Doctrine Next Month
The EU is hoping to complete its new economic security doctrine next month to outline how the bloc should be using its export control powers and other similar trade tools, said Maros Sefcovic, the EU commissioner for trade and economic security.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Sefcovic told the EU’s Export Control Forum in Brussels last week that his team is “working hard to finalize” the document, “which we will put forward early next month.” He said he was directed to craft the “first-ever” economic security doctrine by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who “felt very, very strongly that the world has changed, and we had to have a closer look” at Europe's export control authorities.
“Are they fast enough? Are they sharp enough? Are they efficient enough?” Sefcovic asked.
“Over the past few years, it has become clear that what we need much more than before is indeed a cohesive and coherent joint approach to economic security,” he said. “Those who seek to abuse the system are always looking for the weak spot in application, which in turn harms the whole EU.”
The doctrine will “outline a coordinated and coherent use of our tools, including export controls, in order to strengthen our hand on the global stage and more effectively respond to the most urgent risks to our economy,” he said. But he added that the EU will continue to follow the ideas laid out in its 2023 economic security strategy, which called for a clearer EU-wide approach to protecting trade in sensitive technologies (see 2306200052). “This is not an attempt to reinvent the wheel.”
Sefcovic also noted that the EU is working to reform its customs systems, including a decentralized customs agency and a single EU-wide online customs platform (see 2506270013). It’s challenging for the EU to check every package for compliance with export controls, he said. “It requires an across-the-board effort, what Americans call full-court pressing, on making sure that the conditions we set up [and] the controls we introduce are properly applied across the board and that all airports, all ports, all checking points are actually having the same methodology, same approach, and they are sharing the information.”
The goal is to make it more challenging for export control violators to “abuse the system” by moving goods through the EU’s most lax customs jurisdictions, Sefcovic said. “We simply have to do this very diligently, and really as one body, to make sure that the armor with what we are going to build here will be strong and will be delivering the results.”