It’s one of two sprawling trade investigations the administration launched this spring, under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, in an effort to restore U.S. President Donald Trump’s global tariffs struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in February. A 10 percent interim tariff now in force is due to apply in July, and the Section 301 tariff would follow.
Bernd Lange, the influential chair of the European Parliament’s trade committee, said that Washington was “desperately searching for new legal grounds to sustain its tariff policy” following its Supreme Court defeat.
“Accusing the EU of not doing enough against forced labour is absurd,” Lange wrote in a post on X. “The EU has adopted the world’s most stringent rules against products made with forced labour. This looks very much like trying to make the facts fit a legal justification for tariffs that has already been decided.”
Shared objective
Gill stressed that the EU had adopted in 2024 a regulation banning products made with forced labor, and that this shared objective of “elimination of forced labour in supply chains” was also listed in the EU-U.S. joint statement from last August that elaborated the Turnberry accord.
The EU’s forced labor regulation will, however, only apply from Dec. 2027. This is the justification cited by the U.S. Trade Representative for applying a 10 percent tariff on goods coming from the bloc.
“Although the European Union has adopted a forced labor import prohibition, the prohibition does not come into application until December 14, 2027,” it says in the report. “In light of the above, USTR finds that the European Union is failing to effectively enforce its forced labor import prohibition.”
