World Trade Organization: Brussels escalates brawl with China

THE European Union announced today that escalates the brawl with China at the World Trade Organization by filing trade-restriction lawsuits against Lithuania and preventing appeals by European companies with regard to patents.

“We would prefer to resolve these important, systemic issues through a consultation process and have spent a lot of time trying to do so, but to no avail. Consequently, we have no other choice” explained the vice-president of the European Commission responsible for Trade, Valdis Dombrovskis.

“Good partners behave with respect and must apply legal terms of competition. It is our duty to defend our rights when China is breaking the rules of world trade” where, in the case of Lithuania, “subjects a member state of the European Union to economic coercion that has consequences for our single market” he added.

Lithuania, as noted by the Athens-Macedonian News Agency, allowed Taiwan in November 2021 to open an official representative office in Vilnius under its name, provoking the anger of Beijing, which rejects the official use of the name Taiwan and does not recognize its statehood. island which it considers to be a province of China.

The European Commission states that it is able to demonstrate that since December 2021, China has applied discriminatory and coercive measures against Lithuanian exports and European Union exports involving Lithuanian products.

The Chinese statistics themselves speak of an 80% year-on-year collapse in trade between Lithuania and China in the January-October period.

The European Union also accuses Beijing of actively obstructing legal proceedings by European companies whose patents, mainly in the field of telecommunications technology, are used illegally by Chinese companies.

As of August 2020, China’s courts can bar patent owners from applying to a non-Chinese court to protect their rights through a “non-prosecution order” in a third country. Its violation is punishable by a fine that can reach 130,000 euros per day, according to the EU.

The ban is incompatible with the World Trade Organization agreement on intellectual property rights, according to the European Union.