Economic Court of the CIS imposes customs and quantity limits on returning defected goods to the producer, 01-1/07-09

Article 3(1) of the Agreement on the Creation of the Free Trade Area (ACFTA) of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) regulates the freedom of trade without customs and quantity limits among the 10-12 CIS States.

The Economic Court of the CIS interpreted that the freedom of trade without customs and quantity limits is not applicable to a case of returning defected goods to the State of production, and gave the following reasons:

1) The freedom of trade without customs and quantity limits is applicable to goods transported from the State of production, not from the receiving State (page 3, § 4).
2) “Import and/or export” means a direction of goods from the producer to the consumer, and not vice versa (page 4, § 4).
3) Contrary to Article 1(1) GATT that previews certain advantages in respect of export and import or activities “related to them”, Article 3(1) ACFTA does not contain such words (page 4, § 6).
4) In 5 of 10-12 CIS States, the returned goods will not be subjected to customs and quantity limits (page 5, § 2).

The case 01-1/07-09 was started on the initiative of the Executive Committee of the CIS, and the Court agreed with the opinion of the Adviser General who, by the way, has a wonderful blog http://yukevich.blog.tut.by .

It is interesting to note that a number of Russians legal scholars consider the CIS law as “European law” (together with the EU law and the ECHR law).