EU makes case against Trump's metal tariffs at WTO

The European Union has made its case for the removal of tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump on metal imports in what is already one of the most high-profile and potentially fiery cases ever to come to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Last year, Trump set a 25% tariff on steel imports and a 10% tariff on aluminium using a 1962 US law which gives the president the power to place restrictions of imports on the basis of national security.

Nine complaints about the measures were lodged to the WTO from steel-producing countries including China, India, Russia and Turkey. Following the agreement of an updated free trade pact, Canada and Mexico subsequently dropped their cases.

Officials from both the EU and the US presented their cases to a three-person panel of adjudicators from Chile, the Philippines and Uruguay. The case hangs on the exemption from global trade rules allowed by the WTO in national security cases.

The main argument made by the US is that national security is a sovereign issue, best judged by each country itself and not to be assessed by a three-person WTO panel in Geneva.

A diplomat from one of the complainant countries was quoted by Reuters as sayings: "“If the U.S. lose the case, Donald Trump will be very angry”.

All remaining seven cases against the tariffs will be handled by the same WTO panel which has already announced that it will not make any ruling before the final quarter of 2020. This means that they could come either side of the US Presidential election on November 3.

EU counsel James Flett told the panel that the case was high-profile but also "straightforward". He argued that, far from being about US national security, the tariffs were imposed to "make America rich again".

Flett also argued that the US measures were essentially a "safeguard", which WTO rules state can only be imposed as a response to an increase in imports and this was not the case for all metal grades.

The US legal team said that the EU had on previous occasions made the argument that national security was a "self-judging" matter, such as for sanctions during the Falklands War and US intervention in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

“Truly, the change in the EU position is a mystery,” said one of the US lawyers.

However, a ruling on national security was made by a WTO panel in April. The case was over Russian restrictions on road and rail transport from Ukraine, which the panel found were lawful due to the emergency in relations between the two countries.

The exemption on national security grounds will also form part of the cases brought to the WTO by Qatar against Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and by South Korea over Japan's imposition of export restrictions.

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