European Parliament's S&D Group against burden of proof falling on industry in new anti-dumping system
Ahead of the resumption of trialogue negotiations (between the EU Council, European Parliament and Commission) on Tuesday 12 September with regard to the update of the EU's trade defence instruments, the European Parliament's S&D (Socialists and Democrats) Group has warned that it will oppose the burden of proof falling on industry in the new EU rules on anti-dumping investigations.
"The Socialists and Democrats are firmly against a 'de facto' recognition of market economy status (MES) for China. We won’t go down in history as the ones who opened our market to China while completely disregarding the possibly drastic consequences for European manufacturing and industry", S&D Group leader Gianni Pittella (Italy) warned last week, believing that the conditions were not currently fulfilled for finalising an agreement in trialogue on the draft for a new anti-dumping and anti-subsidy regulation proposed by the Commission in April 2013 – and on which inter-institutional discussions have stumbled since March, in the wake of a fragile agreement reached at the Council at the end of 2016.
“Our red lines are clear. We demand that no additional burden of proof is imposed on European industry. Social and environmental dumping should also be taken into consideration", Pittella stated, adding that the S&D Group requests that the Commission's macro-economic report, which is crucial to determine the existence of distortions, be made accessible to all parties involved in the negotiations before the end of the trialogues and published 15 days after the entry into force of the regulation at the latest.
The S&D Group also believes the parties should be informed from the beginning of an investigation if the new or the old methodology on dumping applies when significant distortions are apparent, and this should be the subject of a separate inter-institutional assessment.
Manufacturing industry backs Parliament's claims. On Monday 11 September, Aegis Europe, the association of EU manufacturing industries and the flag-bearer of 30 federations representing various sectors (from traditional industries to renewables), welcomed the European Parliament's stance "on ensuring that Europe has sufficiently strong, and legally robust, trade defences in place to counter dumping into the EU, and to defend industry and jobs in Europe".
“European manufacturers share the Parliament’s concern that the Commission’s proposed anti-dumping methodology would not be sufficiently robust. Not only would it fail to actually address the threat of dumped imports from countries with significant distortions, the lack of robustness could well invite a myriad of unwarranted challenges at the European Court of Justice”, Aegis Europe states.
In the view of the EU's manufacturing industry, the additional burden of proof requirements weigh too heavily on the Commission, which, Aegis Europe believes, does not have the necessary resources, capacity and access to the evidence necessary to prove two levels of distortion – the ‘detailed cost’ distortions and the ‘horizontal systemic’ distortions in any given country outside the EU. "The Commission’s proposal creates a substantial risk for EU industry, which could end up with no effective trade defences at all", Aegis Europe states.
"The basic legal principles that underpin the amendments put forward by the Parliament are logically coherent and consistent with WTO rules. If it were to be proven that significant distortions exist within a given country, then the onus should naturally shift onto individual exporting companies to show that their prices are not distorted if they want this to be taken into account in the determination of dumping", Aegis Europe concludes. (Original version in French by Emmanuel Hagry)
