A World Trade Organization panel largely backed China in a complaint about European Union import duties on Chinese footwear, dealing a partial victory also to European importers and retailers. In a report issued on Friday, the WTO panel found the EU acted inconsistently with its obligations as a member of the organization in some aspects of its investigation into dumping of leather shoes by Chinese manufacturers and in the way it calculated duties.
The panel rejected the bulk of China’s specific claims against the EU in its original probe.
“China urges the EU to respect the WTO’s ruling, remove discriminatory practices and legislation inconsistent with WTO rules, give fair treatment to Chinese exporters and uphold normal trade activities with China,” Shen Danyang, spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce, said in a statement on the ministry’s website.
China filed its complaint in February 2010 after the EU said it would prolong levies on leather shoes from China and Vietnam for 15 months to help southern producers compete against lower-cost footwear imported by companies such as Nike Inc. and Adidas AG. The duties on some of the disputed footwear expired in March this year.
The EU slapped duties as high as 16.5 percent on 9.7 billion euros ($13.7 billion) of Chinese and Vietnamese leather shoes in 2006 to counter below-cost or “dumped” imports.
But it said there was no need for the EU to change the disputed tariffs because they had already expired. It also rejected the bulk of China's claims on behalf of individual Chinese shoe makers and some of its more specific complaints.
An EU spokesman told Reuters the panel “rejected almost all of the procedural and substantive claims advanced by China.”
“The
panel considered the original and the review investigations conducted
by the EU in the footwear case to be legal under WTO law, with the
exception of few issues. And even with respect to these issues, the EU
faces no implementation obligations, as the anti-dumping duties on
Chinese footwear expired on 31 March 2011,” EU trade spokesman John
Clancy said in a statement.
The case is the second brought by China against the EU at the WTO. In July, China won a similar victory against EU duties on what Europe said were unfairly cheap Chinese screws and bolts.
In that case, a panel condemned the way Europe assesses duties against countries it deems not to be market economies, such as China, Vietnam and Cuba.
