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At today’s Update Conference in Washington, D.C., Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced a sweeping vision for reform of U.S. export laws:
First, we should consider eliminating certain dual-use export license requirements for allies and partner nations — consistent with statutory and international obligations.
Of course, the rub here is what is meant by “consistent with . . . international obligations”? Obviously, this is a reference to the Wassenaar Arrangement, under which the United States has agreed to impose export controls on items on the “Lists of Dual-Use Goods and Technologies” made a part of that arrangement. But, as made clear in the 2006 “Best Practices Guidelines for the Licensing of Items on the Basic List and Sensitive List of Dual-Use Goods and Technologies,” members of the Arrangement are free to establish general licenses or license exceptions which permit the unlimited export of specified goods on the lists to specified destinations. The Guidelines, however, state that the member state should still require companies exporting under those general licenses or license exceptions to keep sufficient records of these exports to permit verification that any terms and conditions of the general licenses or license exceptions have been complied with.
Second, I’ve asked BIS to explore implementing a fast-track process for the review of dual-use export licenses for other key countries that do not pose a significant threat and have a strong history of export control compliance.
This is a laudable goal in theory that may be difficult to achieve in practice. Often the imposition of tighter deadlines for licensing decisions results in more applications being returned without action for minor errors — errors that would previously have been ignored — just so that the licensing officer can stay within the required time frame. That certainly seems to have been the result of the shortened processing guidelines for commodity jurisdiction requests filed with the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls.
And, of course we will continue to scour the Export Administration Regulations and de-list those items and technologies that no longer pose a threat to national security.
Here the Wassenaar Arrangement may prove to be somewhat more of an obstacle. Under the Arrangement, the United States is obligated to control the export of items on the Wassenaar Lists and the overwhelming number of commodities on the Commerce Control List (“CCL”) are also on the Wassenaar Lists. The United States can only really remove those common items from the CCL if it convinces other Wassenaar members to remove the same items from the Wassenaar lists at one of the plenary sessions held under the Arrangement.
Of course, there are all those items in Category 0 of the CCL that aren’t on the Wassenaar Lists, so we can look forward, perhaps, to the immediate removal of “horses by sea” (ECCN 0A980) and “plastic handcuffs” (ECCN 0A982), otherwise known as plastic cable ties, from the CCL.
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