Module 2 Actvity: International Agreements

Hi everybody - it's time for the great reveal! Here are my comments on the Activity. Please feel free to make your own comments in response or to ask any questions if things are still not clear to you. We will also have a chance to talk about the Activity in the Zoom hook up on Tuesday for those of you who can make it

Thank you for your work on this activity. My numbers are as accurate as I can make them, but things can change quickly as new parties accede to the Conventions. You all had numbers which for the most part correspond to mine or were just one or two different:

I hope that you were able to locate the web pages where the Parties to the Convention are listed, as well as the texts of the Conventions themselves. With the exception of the Istanbul Convention, you can see that the Conventions have over 100 parties to them, and in most cases over 160. What is important is that you have some sense of the number of countries that are parties to these various conventions and the very strong influence that they all bear on the work of Customs administrations throughout the world. The exact number is not as important as the fact that there is a very strong global consensus that supports international customs law.

The Revised Kyoto Convention is a very important one and can be seen as the cornerstone of International Customs Law. There has been a steady if unspectacular growth in the number of parties. Five years ago there were 122 parties, now there are 140.

The Trade Facilitation Agreement was adopted by the WTO in 2013 and came into force in 2017. All 166 WTO Members are party to it, although some developing countries have been given extensions of time in which to become compliant with it.

The Istanbul Convention that we are concerned with is the Convention on Temporary Admission, which is administered by the World Customs Organisation (WCO As its name implies, Istanbul deals with imported goods which are going to be in the customs territory briefly and will then be re-exported in an unchanged state (such as exhibitions, equipment for sporting events, and so on). The range of numbers here varied quite a bit. The WCO web site has a list of parties which they say is 76 altogether but when you add them up there are actually 81. I have put 81, but really anything between 70 and 90 might be right!.

The HS Convention (The International Convention on the Harmonized Commodity  Description and Coding System) has 163 parties but is applied in some 212 Countries and Customs Territories.

The Valuation Agreement (the Agreement on Implementation of Article VII of GATT) entered into force with all of the WTO Agreements (except the TFA) on 1 January 1995. It provides detailed guidance on how to give effect to the basic Valuation provisions in GATT, Article VII, which requires goods to be valued according to their transaction value. All WTO Members are party to it. There are now 166 of them. (There were 164 for many years and some web sites appear not to have caught up with the recent addition of two countries.

TRIPS stands for the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. TRIPS entered into force along with the other WTO agreements in January 1995. All countries that become members of the WTO are required to comply with it.  

Mark

1 June 2026