Customs Mutual Assistance Agreements in the light of Article 12 TFA – a Global Perspective

Customs co-operation at international, regional and global levels is aimed at ensuring compliance with applicable laws and regulations and improving trade flow control through the exchange of information on Customs aspects such as transit, export and import declaration data, origin and valuation-related information, trader-related information and in particular information on customs fraud. This exchange of data is currently a key element of the WTO TFA and Article 12 of the TFA considers all the necessary components for such an exchange of information, such as the requesting country’s need, verify its request, protect the exchanged data, and ensure the confidentiality of data and the exchange of data based on the principle of reciprocity. Article 12 TFA also refers to bilateral and regional mutual administrative assistance agreements, which remain the main tool for governments and customs administrations to engage in such cooperation. This paper investigates the different approaches and lists the Customs Mutual Assistance Agreements (CMAAs) of mayor stakeholders in Global Trade, of medium trade nations and of small countries. 23 tables are displaying the results of this research. It investigates CMAAs by help of direct publications on their CMAAs and of other nations that are not publishing data on their CMAAs by pooling data published by other nations. The paper concludes that bilateral mutual agreements are favorable for large nations but difficult to negotiate for small nations. Finally it calls for the importance of regional mutual customs cooperation.