2.1. Customs Specific Agreements

2. Part 1: International Trade Treaties and Conventions

International Customs law is a collection of treaties and instruments that regulate how Customs agencies exercise their functions at the border. Central to these is the RKC, which sets standards for processing goods and passengers entering and departing a Customs territory. Countries that have acceded to the Convention must incorporate these standards into national law through their Customs Act and any supporting Regulations or Orders.

More recently, the WTO adopted the Trade Facilitation Agreement, which requires all WTO Members to accept standards for the clearance of goods that are almost identical to the RKC. The WCO Convention on Temporary Admission (the Istanbul Convention) establishes standards for the temporary entry of specific goods for defined purposes, such as exhibitions and events.

There are many other conventions on particular aspects of Customs work prepared by the WCO and adopted by its members. The most important of these is the Convention on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS Convention), adopted in 1988, which establishes the Harmonized System of tariff nomenclature that now has almost universal application.

In addition, the WTO has developed several agreements that establish principles relating to international trade which Customs agencies must implement. The most important of these for Customs purposes is the Agreement on Valuation. In addition to the Valuation Agreement, Customs agencies must also implement these WTO agreements:

Agreement	Customs Relevance
Sanitary & Phytosanitary Measures	Establishes rules governing quarantine and the application of food safety and animal/plant health measures at the border.
Agreement on Dumping	Sets the rules for applying anti-dumping duties on goods exported to a country below their normal value in the exporting country.
Subsidies & Countervailing Measures	Provides the framework for applying countervailing duties to offset the benefit of subsidies granted to exported goods.
Technical Barriers to Trade	Allows countries to regulate the quality of imported goods, provided such regulations are not used as unnecessary barriers to trade.

The principles set out in all these agreements are founded on the WTO's foundation document, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). For our purposes here, we focus most closely on the HS Convention and the Valuation Agreement. Full texts and further information on all WCO and WTO agreements are available on their respective websites: WCO Conventions and Agreements and WTO Legal Texts.