Today’s edition of the Washington Tariff & Trade Letter has an article (paid subscription required) reporting on the July 27 meeting of the Sensors and Instrumentation Technical Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”). At that meeting, Assistant Secretary of BIS, Kevin Wolf had this to say to the committee members:

To the extent that something today, tomorrow or after the reforms no longer requires authorization for export when it did previously, that will come with a price associated with it

That price, according to Wolf, could be “reexport controls or notification.” Obviously BIS has legitimate concerns about diversion of a product from a country on its “nice” list to a country on the agency’s “naughty” list.

However, the ability of the agency to exercise control over U.S.-origin items that can be legally exported without a license is open to some question. Certainly a foreign court would raise those jurisdictional questions in any effort to extradite a defendant accused of an unlicensed re-export that was in full compliance with local laws. And whether a U.S. court would be inclined to exercise criminal jurisdiction over a foreign defendant in such a case is also an open question. The whole notion that the United States has what amounts to universal jurisdiction over U.S. origin products and the people who touch them, wherever located, is built on a shaky foundation that more or less crumbles when the U.S. permits unlicensed exports of those products.

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