Report from the Commission to the European Parliament – Ninth report: Overview of third country trade defence actions against the European Union

Since the beginning of the global crisis at the end of 2008 the use of trade defence instruments against the EU has been quite intense. It was feared that in many of the new investigations the relevant rules would not be adequately applied and that the instruments would be abused in order to offer protection to national industries and shield them from foreign competition.

The situation in 2011 has only slightly recovered and, as will be shown below, the use of the trade defence instruments against the EU has stabilised. The number of new investigations remains however rather high and the complexity of the cases has increased. In some instances, despite abundant and vigorous interventions, important issues could not have been solved at technical level and WTO dispute settlements could not be avoided. This has generated a high level of activity this year.

This report describes overall trends, the problems identified and results achieved in 2011. It also gives in the annex a detailed analysis of trends and specific cases of the most important users of the instrument.

(Statistics up to 31 December 2011 but commentary on cases and text is updated to March 2012).

• Primary Source

EUR-Lex: COM(2012)344: Follow the progress of this document through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2012:344:FIN

European Commission: SWD(2012)184: Annexes http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=SWD:2012:0184:FIN:EN:PDF

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