ON THE RESEARCH RESULTS OF THE WCO INSTRUMENTS AND TOOLS

Sergei Mozer

РУССКИЙ

On February 25, the St. Petersburg Branch of the Russian Customs Academy hosted the International Scientific and Practical Conference «Actual Issues of the World Economy and International Trade».[1]

The conference was attended by representatives of the Department of Customs Legislation of the Eurasian Economic Commission (hereinafter – EEC, Commission), scientists of the Russian Customs Academy, representatives of the academic community and students.

The scientific event was attended by Sergei Mozer, Deputy Head of the Advanced Customs Technologies Division of the Department of Customs Legislation of the EEC, Ph.D. in law. The topic of his speech was «On scientific and methodological approaches to the analysis and research results of the legal means of the World Customs Organization to improve the Eurasian Economic Union law in the field of customs regulation».

Sergei Mozer noted that the idea to systematize all legal instruments and tools of the World Customs Organization (hereinafter – the WCO, Organization) appeared in the process of studying the issue of revising the International Convention on the Simplification and Harmonization of Customs Procedures of May 18, 1973 within the framework of his expert work in the Revised Kyoto Convention Management Committee (hereinafter – the Committee, RKC MC), as well as the Working Group on the Comprehensive Review of the Revised Kyoto Convention.

In 2018, the Commission was the first to offer the specialists of the RKC MC to conduct a comprehensive analysis of all WCO instruments and tools in the context of customs law institutions.[2] The results of the analysis of legal means should be used in the updating of the Kyoto Convention.

The representative of the Commission explained that in 2020, a methodology for analyzing and systematizing international standards in the field of customs was prepared, and an electronic database of the WCO legal instruments and tools over the period 1953 – 2020 was created. The software solution allows through the use of system requests to select all WCO legal developments in the context of customs law institutions, forms and types of documents, customs operations / business processes, advanced customs  technologies, digitalization of the activities of customs authorities, economic operators, modes of transport, objects, etc.

The conference participants were presented with a statistical analysis of the achieved results.

Along with this, it was noted that on December 11, 2020, the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council adopted «Strategic Directions for the Development of Eurasian Economic Integration until 2025».[3] This act defines the place of cooperation with the WCO. In particular, one of the points of the Strategic Directions provides for the study of the possibility of joining the Eurasian Economic Union to the fundamental WCO instruments and tools. According to Sergei Moser, the implementation of this point requires, first of all, a preliminary comprehensive analysis of the Organization’s legal means, which can be used to improve customs regulation.

Today, the WCO Secretariat starts analyzing the legal instruments for their relationship with the Kyoto Convention. Thus, the work carried out in the WCO and the Commission coincided in terms of research on the modernization of law on the basis of current legal instruments and tools of the World Customs Organization.

In March 2021, the results of the study (in the form of a Guide) will be published by the Russian Customs Academy, which is the WCO’s Regional Training Center. We can say that this is a joint research project of its Research Institute and the EEC Customs Cooperation Unit.

Special gratitude was expressed to the leadership of the Editorial and Publishing Department of the Academy for help in preparing the publication of the Guide.

The conclusions and proposals are planned to be announced in March 2021 at the Revised Kyoto Convention Management Committee session.

 

 

 

Russian Customs Academy: SCIENCE

25 February, 2021

 

[1] International Scientific and Practical Conference «Actual Issues of the World Economy and International Trade». URL: http://spbrta.customs.ru/spbrta/images/news/2020/SMIFTS/programma_konf.pdf

[2] Mozer Sergei. Methodological approaches of updating the Revised Kyoto Convention: report. Revised Kyoto Convention Management Committee (19th Meeting, 12 – 13 November 2018), WCO Headquarters, 2018, Brussels, Belgium. November 12. URL: http://customs-academy.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/EEC_Mozer-Sergei_10.11.2018.pdf      

[3] Strategic Directions for the Development of Eurasian Economic Integration until 2025. URL: https://docs.eaeunion.org/docs/ru-ru/01228321/err_12012021_12